He was a former American marine who would go on to assassinate one of the most popular presidents in American history.
In this episode, we look at the unhappy life of Lee Harvey Oswald and ask ourselves why he pulled the trigger.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are talking about Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who assassinated an American president.
[00:00:29] He was a former marine who defected to the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
[00:00:34] A strange man with a complicated past who, to this day, is still the source of conspiracy theories about what actually happened on that day in 1963.
[00:00:45] In this episode we’ll take a look at the early life of Lee Harvey Oswald, the type of man he was, his time in the Soviet Union and, of course, the event he was most famous for, the assassination of JFK.
[00:00:59] As you will no doubt know, there are plenty of conspiracy theories about whether it was actually Oswald who killed him, too many to go into in this episode in fact.
[00:01:09] So, we’ll have a follow-up episode where we are going to look at all of these theories, and I’ll leave you to decide whether there’s any truth to them.
[00:01:17] OK, let's get into it and talk about Lee Harvey Oswald.
[00:01:25] It was a sunny November afternoon in 1963.
[00:01:30] The city of Dallas was in a jubilant mood because the young, charismatic and handsome President of the United States was in town.
[00:01:40] In Dealey Plaza, a park in downtown Dallas, crowds were gathering, excited for the arrival of the 46-year-old John F. Kennedy.
[00:01:52] Dealey Plaza is a flat, open area filled with trees.
[00:01:56] There’s a bridge heading to the motorway on one side, and on the other, several buildings overlooking the park.
[00:02:04] Throughout the morning, people lined the street, and sat waiting on the grassy banks.
[00:02:11] Finally, at 12:30pm the President’s convertible limousine turned into Dealey Plaza and a buzz of excitement washed over the park.
[00:02:22] The limo slowed, and Kennedy smiled and waved to the crowds, his wife and popular First Lady, Jackie, sat beside him.
[00:02:33] Also in the car were the Governor of Texas, John Connolly, and his wife Nellie.
[00:02:39] As they rounded the corner into the park, Nellie Connally turned to Kennedy and said: "Mr. President, you can't say Dallas doesn't love you.”
[00:02:50] It's believed that Kennedy replied, "No, you certainly can't" - not knowing that they were to be his last words.
[00:03:00] Then suddenly, as Kennedy waved, there was a popping noise.
[00:03:05] Most in the crowd thought it was fireworks, or a car backfiring, and continued waving, and taking photographs.
[00:03:13] But there was another shot, and the President reached up, holding his neck.
[00:03:20] There was confusion for a moment, and some in the crowd dropped to the floor, taking cover.
[00:03:25] Excitement turned to panic, and people began running for safety.
[00:03:31] Then, a third shot hit Kennedy directly in the head, rocked his body backwards and sent blood and brain flying across the limousine.
[00:03:42] Instinctively, Jackie Kennedy jumped up and leaned over the back of the limousine, trying to retrieve the back of her husband’s skull.
[00:03:51] The limousine tore off, accelerated very quickly, in the direction of the underpass towards the freeway.
[00:03:58] In a panic, the crowd began to run for cover, and others turned, looking up.
[00:04:04] Police raced up the grassy knoll, looking for the shooter.
[00:04:09] Witnesses pointed in the direction they thought the shots had come from.
[00:04:14] Looking up, they saw a tall red-brick building: the Texas School Book Depository.
[00:04:23] Just half an hour later, at 1:00pm, John F. Kennedy was pronounced dead at the Parkland Memorial Hospital.
[00:04:31] The President was dead - but who had pulled the trigger?
[00:04:37] To understand who, and more importantly why, we need to go back almost exactly 24 years, to the 18th of October, 1939, in New Orleans.
[00:04:49] This was the date that a lady called Marguerite Frances Claverie gave birth to a son, Lee Harvey Oswald.
[00:04:59] His father, Robert, died two months before Lee was born, so the young boy grew up without a father and didn’t exactly have the easiest of upbringings.
[00:05:10] His mother became an alcoholic, and the family moved around a lot.
[00:05:15] In fact, it's believed that by the time he left school Oswald had lived in 22 different places and gone to 12 different schools.
[00:05:26] Not an easy start, and this led to Oswald skipping school, “truanting” the word is.
[00:05:33] When Oswald began truanting, he was seen by a psychiatrist at a juvenile reform centre, who concluded that the young boy had "personality pattern disturbance with schizoid features and passive-aggressive tendencies.”
[00:05:48] The doctor went on: “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.”
[00:06:07] At age 12, Oswald threatened a family member with a knife.
[00:06:12] And by October of 1956, when he was 17, he dropped out of high school and joined the U.S. Marines.
[00:06:21] But he didn’t really take to, or enjoy his time there, and was described by a fellow Marine as “lonely, aloof, and always hating the outfit.”
[00:06:33] Importantly, for our story, and for American history, he qualified as a marksman, meaning someone trained to shoot a gun.
[00:06:42] Despite being a US Marine, and a soldier during the Cold War, the battle between Capitalism and Socialism, Oswald developed left-wing views, and began voicing pro-Soviet sentiment.
[00:06:57] In fact, he was known among his fellow Marines as “Osvaldovich”, in reference to his left-wing beliefs.
[00:07:05] One Marine said of Oswald that “If you complained about, ‘Oh, we’ve got to go on a march this morning’ or ‘oh, we’ve got to do this this morning,’ scrub barracks or whatever we had to do… he would say that that was the capitalist form of government making us do these things. Karl Marx and his form of government would alleviate that.”
[00:07:25] As strange as a communist US Marine might sound, perhaps this was Oswald - the neglected and isolated child, remember - it was him searching for the belonging he hadn’t found in family life, school or the Marines.
[00:07:44] In his diary, Oswald admitted as much, writing “I was looking for a key to my environment, and then I discovered socialist literature”
[00:07:54] He even taught himself some basic Russian from a grammar book, something that would come in handy later on.
[00:08:01] On the 11th of September, 1959, not even 3 years after enlisting, he was discharged from the Marines, he left the army.
[00:08:11] Just nine days later, at the height of the Cold War, Oswald took his pro-Soviet studying to the next level and boarded a boat from New Orleans to France.
[00:08:24] From there he went to Southampton, in England, then flew to Helsinki, was issued a Soviet visa a few days later, then crossed the border into the Soviet Union and arrived in Moscow on the 16th of October.
[00:08:39] But Oswald had a problem - a big one.
[00:08:43] His visa was only valid for a week, so what did he do?
[00:08:48] He immediately tried to get Soviet citizenship, to become a citizen of the Soviet Union. He figured that he would be welcomed with open arms, he would be welcomed into this communist utopia.
[00:09:01] But unfortunately for Oswald, things went somewhat differently.
[00:09:07] According to his personal diary, when Oswald met with a Russian visa official and asked to become a citizen of the ‘Great Soviet Union’, in his words, he was told that the ‘USSR is only great in literature’ and that he should go home.
[00:09:25] Oswald was crushed, he was devastated.
[00:09:29] He had spent years learning about communist theory and Soviet society, he had tried to learn Russian, even saved up his wages from the Marines to make the long journey across the Iron Curtain only to be rejected once he arrived.
[00:09:46] As he wrote in his diary, “my fondest dreams are shattered because of a petty official.”
[00:09:54] Distraught, three days after his 20th birthday, and less than a week after arriving in the Soviet Union, Oswald attempted suicide, he tried to kill himself.
[00:10:06] According to his diary, his plan was: “ End it. Soak wrist in cold water to numb the pain. Then slash my left wrist.”
[00:10:17] He survived, and after a stint, a short period, in hospital, he was released and allowed to stay in the USSR because the Soviet authorities feared he would cause an international incident if he tried to kill himself again.
[00:10:32] They sent him to Minsk, now the capital of Belarus, where he was given work at a radio and TV factory and an apartment in the city centre.
[00:10:43] He enjoyed a relatively comfortable standard of living compared to working-class Soviet standards, but he was kept under strict surveillance by the intelligence services.
[00:10:54] Strangely enough, Stanislau Shushkevich, the man who would go on to become Belarus’ first post-Soviet head of state, also worked at the same factory as Oswald and was even assigned to help him improve his Russian.
[00:11:08] In Minsk, Oswald met a lady called Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova, and they married on April 30th of 1961.
[00:11:18] According to a man called Peter Savodnik, who wrote a book about Oswald’s time in Minsk, Oswald defection was as psychological as it was ideological, or political.
[00:11:31] Though Oswald did want to be in the USSR and do his part for communism, Savodnik argues that “he went there because he didn't fit in anywhere else, he was a desperate and lonely young man who believed that in Russia he would be rescued."
[00:11:48] Oswald was, it seems, still looking, yearning for somewhere he could feel at home.
[00:11:55] But Soviet life began to wear on the young man, and in February of 1962, he wrote to the U.S Embassy to report that the Soviet authorities were holding him and his wife against their will, and that he wanted to return to the United States.
[00:12:13] Because he had never formally renounced his American citizenship, in June of 1962, Oswald was given a temporary US passport, allowed to return to his homeland and arrived in New York with his Soviet wife and three-month old daughter.
[00:12:31] The family quickly moved to Dallas, in Texas, and Oswald travelled to New Orleans to look for work.
[00:12:39] Struggling to hold a job down, he began engaging in political activity, claiming that he was a representative of a pro-Castro organisation called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
[00:12:51] The New York headquarters of this organisation, however, denied having any knowledge of him.
[00:12:57] One can only imagine what must have been going on in his head at the time, but we do know for sure what he did next.
[00:13:05] In March of 1963, less than a year after returning home, back to the United States, he used an alias, or fake name, and bought two guns: a rifle, and a revolver.
[00:13:18] Now, many people aren’t aware of this next part.
[00:13:22] But Oswald actually had a test run, a practice, to try out his new weapon.
[00:13:29] Around a month after buying his rifle, and just months before he would shoot Kennedy, Oswald took his rifle to the home of an American general, a man called Major General Edwin Walker, and shot through a window as Walker sat at his desk.
[00:13:48] Walker, who was a very vocal anti-communist voice in American society, escaped without any injuries.
[00:13:56] The assailant was never caught, and it was only after Oswald's death that it was revealed to have been him.
[00:14:04] When he returned to New Orleans, he took part in a local radio debate and proudly declared himself a Marxist, and in August of 1963 he was arrested for distributing pro-Castro propaganda.
[00:14:19] Strangely enough, he was still given a full foreign travel passport – despite the fact that he was known to the American authorities and had been interrogated by the F.B.I and C.I.A when he returned from the USSR.
[00:14:35] Using this new passport, Oswald travelled to Mexico for a few weeks, where he visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies and tried to arrange to travel to the Soviet Union via Cuba.
[00:14:48] When he returned to the U.S, he was still looking for work, that was, until a Russian-speaking friend who had been helping Oswald’s wife mentioned that a neighbour knew of a job opportunity - at a book depository in Dallas.
[00:15:04] Little did the neighbour know that their kind offer had unknowingly set the scene for the assassination of the President of the United States.
[00:15:15] In Dallas, Oswald rented a single room under the name O H Lee and began working at the book depository, or warehouse, only returning to see his family in the suburbs on weekends.
[00:15:29] According to the owner of the boarding house where he stayed during the week, Oswald didn’t interact with many of the other residents, only worked and made phone calls.
[00:15:39] “They were local phone calls and he always made them in a foreign language." they said. "I think it was German, or maybe Russian. He was really considerate about it. If other people were wanting to phone he would wait. He was just about as good a tenant as we could wish to have.”
[00:15:55] In November of 1963, it was announced that President Kennedy would be visiting Dallas, and several local newspapers published the route that the President’s motorcade would be taking.
[00:16:09] It passed, of course, the Texas School Book Depository - Oswald’s place of work.
[00:16:17] On the night of Thursday the 21st, Oswald unexpectedly returned to his family home and spent the night - something that he only ever really did at weekends.
[00:16:29] The next morning, on Friday the 22nd, Oswald’s 19-year-old neighbour, Wesley Frazier, gave him a lift to work.
[00:16:38] Frazier noticed that Oswald was carrying a long, heavy parcel.
[00:16:44] It was, Oswald told him, “just some window blinds which I’m taking downtown to get fixed.”
[00:16:51] At 12:30pm that afternoon, on the 22nd of November, Oswald set up his rifle on the sixth floor of the depository building.
[00:17:03] He waited for the motorcade to pass, and fired three shots that killed President Kennedy as his car passed through Dealey Plaza.
[00:17:12] Well, as we will discuss in the next episode, that’s the official story.
[00:17:18] As the President’s car sped away and the crowd down in the plaza tried to make sense of what was going on, Oswald fled the scene and took a bus.
[00:17:28] But as there was such a buzz of police activity in Dealey Plaza, the city quickly filled with traffic.
[00:17:35] Oswald got out and took a taxi back to his boarding house, sitting in the front seat as was common in the Soviet Union.
[00:17:44] The driver, who hadn’t yet heard the news of the President’s assassination, asked Oswald what all the police sirens were for, not knowing that he was sitting next to the assassin.
[00:17:57] Oswald said nothing, and stayed silent for the entire journey.
[00:18:02] The driver would later say that he thought Oswald was “a wino two days off the bottle,” meaning an alcoholic experiencing withdrawal symptoms.
[00:18:13] He dropped him off a few minutes from the boarding house, and after checking the coast was clear, after checking the police weren’t following him, Oswald went inside.
[00:18:24] The only person there was a housekeeper, Earlene Roberts, who was sitting watching the television, having heard the news of the President’s assassination just minutes before.
[00:18:35] Around 1pm Oswald, or “Mr. Lee” as he was known to the other residents, arrived and rushed across the living-room into his bedroom.
[00:18:45] “You’re in a hurry, aren’t you?” Roberts asked him, but Oswald did not respond.
[00:18:51] He left again moments later in a different jacket, a pistol stuffed into the waistband of his trousers.
[00:18:59] Back at the Texas Book Depository, where police officers were now searching, certain that that was where the shots had come from, the supervisor told police
[00:19:09] that only one man was missing: Lee Harvey Oswald.
[00:19:15] At 1.15pm Oswald was stopped by a Dallas police patrolman named J.D Tippit, who thought he matched the suspect’s description already being passed around on the police radio.
[00:19:28] Oswald shot and killed Tippit with his revolver, and around half an hour later, at 1.45pm, Oswald was captured in the Texas Theatre.
[00:19:40] By 7pm, less than 7 hours after he had pulled the trigger, he had been formally charged with the murder of President Kennedy, and by then news of Kennedy’s assassination had spread around the world.
[00:19:56] Oswald, the outcast Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union, had shot dead the President of the United States.
[00:20:06] So why did he do it?
[00:20:09] According to one of Oswald’s friends, Paul Gregory, he didn’t even particularly dislike Kennedy.
[00:20:16] In fact, the family kept a copy of Time Magazine with Kennedy on the front cover on display in their home.
[00:20:23] Priscilla McMillan, a friend of Oswald’s wife, even said that “Lee liked Kennedy.”
[00:20:29] “He liked him in civil rights. He disliked him for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba,” she said. “But insofar as he spoke about Kennedy, it was to praise him.”
[00:20:39] As we’ll see in the next episode, there are many, many different theories as to why - and indeed how - Oswald killed Kennedy.
[00:20:50] But if we accept the official version of events for a moment, perhaps Oswald, despite actually quite admiring Kennedy on a personal level, decided that killing him was the best way to send a political, or ideological message.
[00:21:07] With Cold War tensions at their peak in 1963, maybe Oswald thought that killing the symbol of American power - the president - would please the Soviet Union and that he would, finally, find the place he belonged, the place he had been searching for his entire life.
[00:21:27] But as you probably know, this is not the end of the story of Lee Harvey Oswald.
[00:21:34] On the morning of the 24th, less than 48 hours after shooting JFK, Oswald was being led through the underground car park of the Dallas police station to be transferred to an interrogation office.
[00:21:48] The small space was filled with a crowd of reporters and police officers, and there was very little security.
[00:21:56] Nonetheless, Oswald was taken through the crowd with two officers by his side.
[00:22:03] James Leavelle, one of the Dallas police officers who was at his side, later said, “I put the handcuffs on him, and in the process of doing that, I more in jest kind of said, ‘Lee, if anybody shoots at you, I hope they’re as good a shot as you are.”
[00:22:20] Oswald, he said, “kind of laughed and he said, ‘Oh, you’re being melodramatic,’ or something to that effect. ‘Nobody’s going to shoot at me.'”
[00:22:30] Anyway, as Oswald emerged from the station, a man named Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner with ties to the Chicago underworld, approached Oswald and shot him in the stomach.
[00:22:45] Everyone stood around in shock for a second, as Oswald screamed and fell to the floor.
[00:22:53] He was taken to Parkland Memorial hospital - the same hospital where Kennedy died just two days before.
[00:23:01] At 1.07pm, Oswald was pronounced dead.
[00:23:08] As the incident was being broadcast on television, millions of Americans watched Oswald’s assassination live.
[00:23:17] As you may know, I’ve just given you the official version of events.
[00:23:22] That Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone was the final conclusion of the Warren Commission - the body set up to investigate the assassination.
[00:23:31] Yet the assassination of John F. Kennedy [and Oswald’s role in it] is perhaps the most popular conspiracy theory of all time.
[00:23:40] It is, you could say, the mother of all conspiracy theories - the one that even the most rational, trusting people believe has some truth to it.
[00:23:52] For many people, something about that day in 1963 smelled fishy, it just wasn’t quite right.
[00:24:01] Whether it be Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union, and conspiracies that he was a Soviet hitman sent to strike a blow in the Cold War, or Jack Ruby’s mafia connections - indeed, Kennedy’s supposed mafia connections.
[00:24:15] Or even the fact that he was walked through an open car park with minimal security just days after assassinating the President of the United States.
[00:24:26] Many Americans don’t believe the Warren Commission’s findings; that a lone gunman, one man alone, could kill the President.
[00:24:35] A Gallup poll from March of 2001 found that 81 percent of Americans believed there were other people involved in Kennedy’s death.
[00:24:45] Just 13 percent believed that Oswald acted alone.
[00:24:51] Indeed, the focus of the next episode, a follow-up to this one, will be some of the most widely-believed conspiracy theories about what really happened on that fateful November afternoon.
[00:25:04] But it is important to remember that Oswald was, at the very least, involved.
[00:25:10] He was a US Marine who defected to the Soviet Union, afterall.
[00:25:15] A trained marksman who hated American capitalism and everything it represented.
[00:25:21] A man who, wherever he went in the world, never seemed to quite fit in and lived a mysterious life, travelling around and interacting with political radicals, Soviet and Cuban spies.
[00:25:35] Some say he was personally instructed to kill Kennedy by the leader of the Soviet Union, others say Oswald was the gunman in the biggest mob killing of all time.
[00:25:47] There are few who debate that Lee Harvey Oswald pulled the trigger, but to the question of “why”, and “with whose help?”, well that is a question that seems like it might never truly be solved.
[00:26:04] OK then, that is it for today’s episode on Lee Harvey Oswald - the man who killed the president.
[00:26:11] I hope it was an interesting one, and whether you knew a lot about Lee Harvey Oswald, or you didn’t know much about his backstory at all, well I hope you learned something new.
[00:26:21] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:26:25] Why do you think Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F. Kennedy?
[00:26:29] Do you believe he was the only person involved?
[00:26:32] How might the world have been different if the bullets had missed?
[00:26:37] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:26:40] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:26:48] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:26:53] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are talking about Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who assassinated an American president.
[00:00:29] He was a former marine who defected to the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
[00:00:34] A strange man with a complicated past who, to this day, is still the source of conspiracy theories about what actually happened on that day in 1963.
[00:00:45] In this episode we’ll take a look at the early life of Lee Harvey Oswald, the type of man he was, his time in the Soviet Union and, of course, the event he was most famous for, the assassination of JFK.
[00:00:59] As you will no doubt know, there are plenty of conspiracy theories about whether it was actually Oswald who killed him, too many to go into in this episode in fact.
[00:01:09] So, we’ll have a follow-up episode where we are going to look at all of these theories, and I’ll leave you to decide whether there’s any truth to them.
[00:01:17] OK, let's get into it and talk about Lee Harvey Oswald.
[00:01:25] It was a sunny November afternoon in 1963.
[00:01:30] The city of Dallas was in a jubilant mood because the young, charismatic and handsome President of the United States was in town.
[00:01:40] In Dealey Plaza, a park in downtown Dallas, crowds were gathering, excited for the arrival of the 46-year-old John F. Kennedy.
[00:01:52] Dealey Plaza is a flat, open area filled with trees.
[00:01:56] There’s a bridge heading to the motorway on one side, and on the other, several buildings overlooking the park.
[00:02:04] Throughout the morning, people lined the street, and sat waiting on the grassy banks.
[00:02:11] Finally, at 12:30pm the President’s convertible limousine turned into Dealey Plaza and a buzz of excitement washed over the park.
[00:02:22] The limo slowed, and Kennedy smiled and waved to the crowds, his wife and popular First Lady, Jackie, sat beside him.
[00:02:33] Also in the car were the Governor of Texas, John Connolly, and his wife Nellie.
[00:02:39] As they rounded the corner into the park, Nellie Connally turned to Kennedy and said: "Mr. President, you can't say Dallas doesn't love you.”
[00:02:50] It's believed that Kennedy replied, "No, you certainly can't" - not knowing that they were to be his last words.
[00:03:00] Then suddenly, as Kennedy waved, there was a popping noise.
[00:03:05] Most in the crowd thought it was fireworks, or a car backfiring, and continued waving, and taking photographs.
[00:03:13] But there was another shot, and the President reached up, holding his neck.
[00:03:20] There was confusion for a moment, and some in the crowd dropped to the floor, taking cover.
[00:03:25] Excitement turned to panic, and people began running for safety.
[00:03:31] Then, a third shot hit Kennedy directly in the head, rocked his body backwards and sent blood and brain flying across the limousine.
[00:03:42] Instinctively, Jackie Kennedy jumped up and leaned over the back of the limousine, trying to retrieve the back of her husband’s skull.
[00:03:51] The limousine tore off, accelerated very quickly, in the direction of the underpass towards the freeway.
[00:03:58] In a panic, the crowd began to run for cover, and others turned, looking up.
[00:04:04] Police raced up the grassy knoll, looking for the shooter.
[00:04:09] Witnesses pointed in the direction they thought the shots had come from.
[00:04:14] Looking up, they saw a tall red-brick building: the Texas School Book Depository.
[00:04:23] Just half an hour later, at 1:00pm, John F. Kennedy was pronounced dead at the Parkland Memorial Hospital.
[00:04:31] The President was dead - but who had pulled the trigger?
[00:04:37] To understand who, and more importantly why, we need to go back almost exactly 24 years, to the 18th of October, 1939, in New Orleans.
[00:04:49] This was the date that a lady called Marguerite Frances Claverie gave birth to a son, Lee Harvey Oswald.
[00:04:59] His father, Robert, died two months before Lee was born, so the young boy grew up without a father and didn’t exactly have the easiest of upbringings.
[00:05:10] His mother became an alcoholic, and the family moved around a lot.
[00:05:15] In fact, it's believed that by the time he left school Oswald had lived in 22 different places and gone to 12 different schools.
[00:05:26] Not an easy start, and this led to Oswald skipping school, “truanting” the word is.
[00:05:33] When Oswald began truanting, he was seen by a psychiatrist at a juvenile reform centre, who concluded that the young boy had "personality pattern disturbance with schizoid features and passive-aggressive tendencies.”
[00:05:48] The doctor went on: “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.”
[00:06:07] At age 12, Oswald threatened a family member with a knife.
[00:06:12] And by October of 1956, when he was 17, he dropped out of high school and joined the U.S. Marines.
[00:06:21] But he didn’t really take to, or enjoy his time there, and was described by a fellow Marine as “lonely, aloof, and always hating the outfit.”
[00:06:33] Importantly, for our story, and for American history, he qualified as a marksman, meaning someone trained to shoot a gun.
[00:06:42] Despite being a US Marine, and a soldier during the Cold War, the battle between Capitalism and Socialism, Oswald developed left-wing views, and began voicing pro-Soviet sentiment.
[00:06:57] In fact, he was known among his fellow Marines as “Osvaldovich”, in reference to his left-wing beliefs.
[00:07:05] One Marine said of Oswald that “If you complained about, ‘Oh, we’ve got to go on a march this morning’ or ‘oh, we’ve got to do this this morning,’ scrub barracks or whatever we had to do… he would say that that was the capitalist form of government making us do these things. Karl Marx and his form of government would alleviate that.”
[00:07:25] As strange as a communist US Marine might sound, perhaps this was Oswald - the neglected and isolated child, remember - it was him searching for the belonging he hadn’t found in family life, school or the Marines.
[00:07:44] In his diary, Oswald admitted as much, writing “I was looking for a key to my environment, and then I discovered socialist literature”
[00:07:54] He even taught himself some basic Russian from a grammar book, something that would come in handy later on.
[00:08:01] On the 11th of September, 1959, not even 3 years after enlisting, he was discharged from the Marines, he left the army.
[00:08:11] Just nine days later, at the height of the Cold War, Oswald took his pro-Soviet studying to the next level and boarded a boat from New Orleans to France.
[00:08:24] From there he went to Southampton, in England, then flew to Helsinki, was issued a Soviet visa a few days later, then crossed the border into the Soviet Union and arrived in Moscow on the 16th of October.
[00:08:39] But Oswald had a problem - a big one.
[00:08:43] His visa was only valid for a week, so what did he do?
[00:08:48] He immediately tried to get Soviet citizenship, to become a citizen of the Soviet Union. He figured that he would be welcomed with open arms, he would be welcomed into this communist utopia.
[00:09:01] But unfortunately for Oswald, things went somewhat differently.
[00:09:07] According to his personal diary, when Oswald met with a Russian visa official and asked to become a citizen of the ‘Great Soviet Union’, in his words, he was told that the ‘USSR is only great in literature’ and that he should go home.
[00:09:25] Oswald was crushed, he was devastated.
[00:09:29] He had spent years learning about communist theory and Soviet society, he had tried to learn Russian, even saved up his wages from the Marines to make the long journey across the Iron Curtain only to be rejected once he arrived.
[00:09:46] As he wrote in his diary, “my fondest dreams are shattered because of a petty official.”
[00:09:54] Distraught, three days after his 20th birthday, and less than a week after arriving in the Soviet Union, Oswald attempted suicide, he tried to kill himself.
[00:10:06] According to his diary, his plan was: “ End it. Soak wrist in cold water to numb the pain. Then slash my left wrist.”
[00:10:17] He survived, and after a stint, a short period, in hospital, he was released and allowed to stay in the USSR because the Soviet authorities feared he would cause an international incident if he tried to kill himself again.
[00:10:32] They sent him to Minsk, now the capital of Belarus, where he was given work at a radio and TV factory and an apartment in the city centre.
[00:10:43] He enjoyed a relatively comfortable standard of living compared to working-class Soviet standards, but he was kept under strict surveillance by the intelligence services.
[00:10:54] Strangely enough, Stanislau Shushkevich, the man who would go on to become Belarus’ first post-Soviet head of state, also worked at the same factory as Oswald and was even assigned to help him improve his Russian.
[00:11:08] In Minsk, Oswald met a lady called Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova, and they married on April 30th of 1961.
[00:11:18] According to a man called Peter Savodnik, who wrote a book about Oswald’s time in Minsk, Oswald defection was as psychological as it was ideological, or political.
[00:11:31] Though Oswald did want to be in the USSR and do his part for communism, Savodnik argues that “he went there because he didn't fit in anywhere else, he was a desperate and lonely young man who believed that in Russia he would be rescued."
[00:11:48] Oswald was, it seems, still looking, yearning for somewhere he could feel at home.
[00:11:55] But Soviet life began to wear on the young man, and in February of 1962, he wrote to the U.S Embassy to report that the Soviet authorities were holding him and his wife against their will, and that he wanted to return to the United States.
[00:12:13] Because he had never formally renounced his American citizenship, in June of 1962, Oswald was given a temporary US passport, allowed to return to his homeland and arrived in New York with his Soviet wife and three-month old daughter.
[00:12:31] The family quickly moved to Dallas, in Texas, and Oswald travelled to New Orleans to look for work.
[00:12:39] Struggling to hold a job down, he began engaging in political activity, claiming that he was a representative of a pro-Castro organisation called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
[00:12:51] The New York headquarters of this organisation, however, denied having any knowledge of him.
[00:12:57] One can only imagine what must have been going on in his head at the time, but we do know for sure what he did next.
[00:13:05] In March of 1963, less than a year after returning home, back to the United States, he used an alias, or fake name, and bought two guns: a rifle, and a revolver.
[00:13:18] Now, many people aren’t aware of this next part.
[00:13:22] But Oswald actually had a test run, a practice, to try out his new weapon.
[00:13:29] Around a month after buying his rifle, and just months before he would shoot Kennedy, Oswald took his rifle to the home of an American general, a man called Major General Edwin Walker, and shot through a window as Walker sat at his desk.
[00:13:48] Walker, who was a very vocal anti-communist voice in American society, escaped without any injuries.
[00:13:56] The assailant was never caught, and it was only after Oswald's death that it was revealed to have been him.
[00:14:04] When he returned to New Orleans, he took part in a local radio debate and proudly declared himself a Marxist, and in August of 1963 he was arrested for distributing pro-Castro propaganda.
[00:14:19] Strangely enough, he was still given a full foreign travel passport – despite the fact that he was known to the American authorities and had been interrogated by the F.B.I and C.I.A when he returned from the USSR.
[00:14:35] Using this new passport, Oswald travelled to Mexico for a few weeks, where he visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies and tried to arrange to travel to the Soviet Union via Cuba.
[00:14:48] When he returned to the U.S, he was still looking for work, that was, until a Russian-speaking friend who had been helping Oswald’s wife mentioned that a neighbour knew of a job opportunity - at a book depository in Dallas.
[00:15:04] Little did the neighbour know that their kind offer had unknowingly set the scene for the assassination of the President of the United States.
[00:15:15] In Dallas, Oswald rented a single room under the name O H Lee and began working at the book depository, or warehouse, only returning to see his family in the suburbs on weekends.
[00:15:29] According to the owner of the boarding house where he stayed during the week, Oswald didn’t interact with many of the other residents, only worked and made phone calls.
[00:15:39] “They were local phone calls and he always made them in a foreign language." they said. "I think it was German, or maybe Russian. He was really considerate about it. If other people were wanting to phone he would wait. He was just about as good a tenant as we could wish to have.”
[00:15:55] In November of 1963, it was announced that President Kennedy would be visiting Dallas, and several local newspapers published the route that the President’s motorcade would be taking.
[00:16:09] It passed, of course, the Texas School Book Depository - Oswald’s place of work.
[00:16:17] On the night of Thursday the 21st, Oswald unexpectedly returned to his family home and spent the night - something that he only ever really did at weekends.
[00:16:29] The next morning, on Friday the 22nd, Oswald’s 19-year-old neighbour, Wesley Frazier, gave him a lift to work.
[00:16:38] Frazier noticed that Oswald was carrying a long, heavy parcel.
[00:16:44] It was, Oswald told him, “just some window blinds which I’m taking downtown to get fixed.”
[00:16:51] At 12:30pm that afternoon, on the 22nd of November, Oswald set up his rifle on the sixth floor of the depository building.
[00:17:03] He waited for the motorcade to pass, and fired three shots that killed President Kennedy as his car passed through Dealey Plaza.
[00:17:12] Well, as we will discuss in the next episode, that’s the official story.
[00:17:18] As the President’s car sped away and the crowd down in the plaza tried to make sense of what was going on, Oswald fled the scene and took a bus.
[00:17:28] But as there was such a buzz of police activity in Dealey Plaza, the city quickly filled with traffic.
[00:17:35] Oswald got out and took a taxi back to his boarding house, sitting in the front seat as was common in the Soviet Union.
[00:17:44] The driver, who hadn’t yet heard the news of the President’s assassination, asked Oswald what all the police sirens were for, not knowing that he was sitting next to the assassin.
[00:17:57] Oswald said nothing, and stayed silent for the entire journey.
[00:18:02] The driver would later say that he thought Oswald was “a wino two days off the bottle,” meaning an alcoholic experiencing withdrawal symptoms.
[00:18:13] He dropped him off a few minutes from the boarding house, and after checking the coast was clear, after checking the police weren’t following him, Oswald went inside.
[00:18:24] The only person there was a housekeeper, Earlene Roberts, who was sitting watching the television, having heard the news of the President’s assassination just minutes before.
[00:18:35] Around 1pm Oswald, or “Mr. Lee” as he was known to the other residents, arrived and rushed across the living-room into his bedroom.
[00:18:45] “You’re in a hurry, aren’t you?” Roberts asked him, but Oswald did not respond.
[00:18:51] He left again moments later in a different jacket, a pistol stuffed into the waistband of his trousers.
[00:18:59] Back at the Texas Book Depository, where police officers were now searching, certain that that was where the shots had come from, the supervisor told police
[00:19:09] that only one man was missing: Lee Harvey Oswald.
[00:19:15] At 1.15pm Oswald was stopped by a Dallas police patrolman named J.D Tippit, who thought he matched the suspect’s description already being passed around on the police radio.
[00:19:28] Oswald shot and killed Tippit with his revolver, and around half an hour later, at 1.45pm, Oswald was captured in the Texas Theatre.
[00:19:40] By 7pm, less than 7 hours after he had pulled the trigger, he had been formally charged with the murder of President Kennedy, and by then news of Kennedy’s assassination had spread around the world.
[00:19:56] Oswald, the outcast Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union, had shot dead the President of the United States.
[00:20:06] So why did he do it?
[00:20:09] According to one of Oswald’s friends, Paul Gregory, he didn’t even particularly dislike Kennedy.
[00:20:16] In fact, the family kept a copy of Time Magazine with Kennedy on the front cover on display in their home.
[00:20:23] Priscilla McMillan, a friend of Oswald’s wife, even said that “Lee liked Kennedy.”
[00:20:29] “He liked him in civil rights. He disliked him for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba,” she said. “But insofar as he spoke about Kennedy, it was to praise him.”
[00:20:39] As we’ll see in the next episode, there are many, many different theories as to why - and indeed how - Oswald killed Kennedy.
[00:20:50] But if we accept the official version of events for a moment, perhaps Oswald, despite actually quite admiring Kennedy on a personal level, decided that killing him was the best way to send a political, or ideological message.
[00:21:07] With Cold War tensions at their peak in 1963, maybe Oswald thought that killing the symbol of American power - the president - would please the Soviet Union and that he would, finally, find the place he belonged, the place he had been searching for his entire life.
[00:21:27] But as you probably know, this is not the end of the story of Lee Harvey Oswald.
[00:21:34] On the morning of the 24th, less than 48 hours after shooting JFK, Oswald was being led through the underground car park of the Dallas police station to be transferred to an interrogation office.
[00:21:48] The small space was filled with a crowd of reporters and police officers, and there was very little security.
[00:21:56] Nonetheless, Oswald was taken through the crowd with two officers by his side.
[00:22:03] James Leavelle, one of the Dallas police officers who was at his side, later said, “I put the handcuffs on him, and in the process of doing that, I more in jest kind of said, ‘Lee, if anybody shoots at you, I hope they’re as good a shot as you are.”
[00:22:20] Oswald, he said, “kind of laughed and he said, ‘Oh, you’re being melodramatic,’ or something to that effect. ‘Nobody’s going to shoot at me.'”
[00:22:30] Anyway, as Oswald emerged from the station, a man named Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner with ties to the Chicago underworld, approached Oswald and shot him in the stomach.
[00:22:45] Everyone stood around in shock for a second, as Oswald screamed and fell to the floor.
[00:22:53] He was taken to Parkland Memorial hospital - the same hospital where Kennedy died just two days before.
[00:23:01] At 1.07pm, Oswald was pronounced dead.
[00:23:08] As the incident was being broadcast on television, millions of Americans watched Oswald’s assassination live.
[00:23:17] As you may know, I’ve just given you the official version of events.
[00:23:22] That Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone was the final conclusion of the Warren Commission - the body set up to investigate the assassination.
[00:23:31] Yet the assassination of John F. Kennedy [and Oswald’s role in it] is perhaps the most popular conspiracy theory of all time.
[00:23:40] It is, you could say, the mother of all conspiracy theories - the one that even the most rational, trusting people believe has some truth to it.
[00:23:52] For many people, something about that day in 1963 smelled fishy, it just wasn’t quite right.
[00:24:01] Whether it be Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union, and conspiracies that he was a Soviet hitman sent to strike a blow in the Cold War, or Jack Ruby’s mafia connections - indeed, Kennedy’s supposed mafia connections.
[00:24:15] Or even the fact that he was walked through an open car park with minimal security just days after assassinating the President of the United States.
[00:24:26] Many Americans don’t believe the Warren Commission’s findings; that a lone gunman, one man alone, could kill the President.
[00:24:35] A Gallup poll from March of 2001 found that 81 percent of Americans believed there were other people involved in Kennedy’s death.
[00:24:45] Just 13 percent believed that Oswald acted alone.
[00:24:51] Indeed, the focus of the next episode, a follow-up to this one, will be some of the most widely-believed conspiracy theories about what really happened on that fateful November afternoon.
[00:25:04] But it is important to remember that Oswald was, at the very least, involved.
[00:25:10] He was a US Marine who defected to the Soviet Union, afterall.
[00:25:15] A trained marksman who hated American capitalism and everything it represented.
[00:25:21] A man who, wherever he went in the world, never seemed to quite fit in and lived a mysterious life, travelling around and interacting with political radicals, Soviet and Cuban spies.
[00:25:35] Some say he was personally instructed to kill Kennedy by the leader of the Soviet Union, others say Oswald was the gunman in the biggest mob killing of all time.
[00:25:47] There are few who debate that Lee Harvey Oswald pulled the trigger, but to the question of “why”, and “with whose help?”, well that is a question that seems like it might never truly be solved.
[00:26:04] OK then, that is it for today’s episode on Lee Harvey Oswald - the man who killed the president.
[00:26:11] I hope it was an interesting one, and whether you knew a lot about Lee Harvey Oswald, or you didn’t know much about his backstory at all, well I hope you learned something new.
[00:26:21] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:26:25] Why do you think Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F. Kennedy?
[00:26:29] Do you believe he was the only person involved?
[00:26:32] How might the world have been different if the bullets had missed?
[00:26:37] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:26:40] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:26:48] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:26:53] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are talking about Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who assassinated an American president.
[00:00:29] He was a former marine who defected to the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
[00:00:34] A strange man with a complicated past who, to this day, is still the source of conspiracy theories about what actually happened on that day in 1963.
[00:00:45] In this episode we’ll take a look at the early life of Lee Harvey Oswald, the type of man he was, his time in the Soviet Union and, of course, the event he was most famous for, the assassination of JFK.
[00:00:59] As you will no doubt know, there are plenty of conspiracy theories about whether it was actually Oswald who killed him, too many to go into in this episode in fact.
[00:01:09] So, we’ll have a follow-up episode where we are going to look at all of these theories, and I’ll leave you to decide whether there’s any truth to them.
[00:01:17] OK, let's get into it and talk about Lee Harvey Oswald.
[00:01:25] It was a sunny November afternoon in 1963.
[00:01:30] The city of Dallas was in a jubilant mood because the young, charismatic and handsome President of the United States was in town.
[00:01:40] In Dealey Plaza, a park in downtown Dallas, crowds were gathering, excited for the arrival of the 46-year-old John F. Kennedy.
[00:01:52] Dealey Plaza is a flat, open area filled with trees.
[00:01:56] There’s a bridge heading to the motorway on one side, and on the other, several buildings overlooking the park.
[00:02:04] Throughout the morning, people lined the street, and sat waiting on the grassy banks.
[00:02:11] Finally, at 12:30pm the President’s convertible limousine turned into Dealey Plaza and a buzz of excitement washed over the park.
[00:02:22] The limo slowed, and Kennedy smiled and waved to the crowds, his wife and popular First Lady, Jackie, sat beside him.
[00:02:33] Also in the car were the Governor of Texas, John Connolly, and his wife Nellie.
[00:02:39] As they rounded the corner into the park, Nellie Connally turned to Kennedy and said: "Mr. President, you can't say Dallas doesn't love you.”
[00:02:50] It's believed that Kennedy replied, "No, you certainly can't" - not knowing that they were to be his last words.
[00:03:00] Then suddenly, as Kennedy waved, there was a popping noise.
[00:03:05] Most in the crowd thought it was fireworks, or a car backfiring, and continued waving, and taking photographs.
[00:03:13] But there was another shot, and the President reached up, holding his neck.
[00:03:20] There was confusion for a moment, and some in the crowd dropped to the floor, taking cover.
[00:03:25] Excitement turned to panic, and people began running for safety.
[00:03:31] Then, a third shot hit Kennedy directly in the head, rocked his body backwards and sent blood and brain flying across the limousine.
[00:03:42] Instinctively, Jackie Kennedy jumped up and leaned over the back of the limousine, trying to retrieve the back of her husband’s skull.
[00:03:51] The limousine tore off, accelerated very quickly, in the direction of the underpass towards the freeway.
[00:03:58] In a panic, the crowd began to run for cover, and others turned, looking up.
[00:04:04] Police raced up the grassy knoll, looking for the shooter.
[00:04:09] Witnesses pointed in the direction they thought the shots had come from.
[00:04:14] Looking up, they saw a tall red-brick building: the Texas School Book Depository.
[00:04:23] Just half an hour later, at 1:00pm, John F. Kennedy was pronounced dead at the Parkland Memorial Hospital.
[00:04:31] The President was dead - but who had pulled the trigger?
[00:04:37] To understand who, and more importantly why, we need to go back almost exactly 24 years, to the 18th of October, 1939, in New Orleans.
[00:04:49] This was the date that a lady called Marguerite Frances Claverie gave birth to a son, Lee Harvey Oswald.
[00:04:59] His father, Robert, died two months before Lee was born, so the young boy grew up without a father and didn’t exactly have the easiest of upbringings.
[00:05:10] His mother became an alcoholic, and the family moved around a lot.
[00:05:15] In fact, it's believed that by the time he left school Oswald had lived in 22 different places and gone to 12 different schools.
[00:05:26] Not an easy start, and this led to Oswald skipping school, “truanting” the word is.
[00:05:33] When Oswald began truanting, he was seen by a psychiatrist at a juvenile reform centre, who concluded that the young boy had "personality pattern disturbance with schizoid features and passive-aggressive tendencies.”
[00:05:48] The doctor went on: “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.”
[00:06:07] At age 12, Oswald threatened a family member with a knife.
[00:06:12] And by October of 1956, when he was 17, he dropped out of high school and joined the U.S. Marines.
[00:06:21] But he didn’t really take to, or enjoy his time there, and was described by a fellow Marine as “lonely, aloof, and always hating the outfit.”
[00:06:33] Importantly, for our story, and for American history, he qualified as a marksman, meaning someone trained to shoot a gun.
[00:06:42] Despite being a US Marine, and a soldier during the Cold War, the battle between Capitalism and Socialism, Oswald developed left-wing views, and began voicing pro-Soviet sentiment.
[00:06:57] In fact, he was known among his fellow Marines as “Osvaldovich”, in reference to his left-wing beliefs.
[00:07:05] One Marine said of Oswald that “If you complained about, ‘Oh, we’ve got to go on a march this morning’ or ‘oh, we’ve got to do this this morning,’ scrub barracks or whatever we had to do… he would say that that was the capitalist form of government making us do these things. Karl Marx and his form of government would alleviate that.”
[00:07:25] As strange as a communist US Marine might sound, perhaps this was Oswald - the neglected and isolated child, remember - it was him searching for the belonging he hadn’t found in family life, school or the Marines.
[00:07:44] In his diary, Oswald admitted as much, writing “I was looking for a key to my environment, and then I discovered socialist literature”
[00:07:54] He even taught himself some basic Russian from a grammar book, something that would come in handy later on.
[00:08:01] On the 11th of September, 1959, not even 3 years after enlisting, he was discharged from the Marines, he left the army.
[00:08:11] Just nine days later, at the height of the Cold War, Oswald took his pro-Soviet studying to the next level and boarded a boat from New Orleans to France.
[00:08:24] From there he went to Southampton, in England, then flew to Helsinki, was issued a Soviet visa a few days later, then crossed the border into the Soviet Union and arrived in Moscow on the 16th of October.
[00:08:39] But Oswald had a problem - a big one.
[00:08:43] His visa was only valid for a week, so what did he do?
[00:08:48] He immediately tried to get Soviet citizenship, to become a citizen of the Soviet Union. He figured that he would be welcomed with open arms, he would be welcomed into this communist utopia.
[00:09:01] But unfortunately for Oswald, things went somewhat differently.
[00:09:07] According to his personal diary, when Oswald met with a Russian visa official and asked to become a citizen of the ‘Great Soviet Union’, in his words, he was told that the ‘USSR is only great in literature’ and that he should go home.
[00:09:25] Oswald was crushed, he was devastated.
[00:09:29] He had spent years learning about communist theory and Soviet society, he had tried to learn Russian, even saved up his wages from the Marines to make the long journey across the Iron Curtain only to be rejected once he arrived.
[00:09:46] As he wrote in his diary, “my fondest dreams are shattered because of a petty official.”
[00:09:54] Distraught, three days after his 20th birthday, and less than a week after arriving in the Soviet Union, Oswald attempted suicide, he tried to kill himself.
[00:10:06] According to his diary, his plan was: “ End it. Soak wrist in cold water to numb the pain. Then slash my left wrist.”
[00:10:17] He survived, and after a stint, a short period, in hospital, he was released and allowed to stay in the USSR because the Soviet authorities feared he would cause an international incident if he tried to kill himself again.
[00:10:32] They sent him to Minsk, now the capital of Belarus, where he was given work at a radio and TV factory and an apartment in the city centre.
[00:10:43] He enjoyed a relatively comfortable standard of living compared to working-class Soviet standards, but he was kept under strict surveillance by the intelligence services.
[00:10:54] Strangely enough, Stanislau Shushkevich, the man who would go on to become Belarus’ first post-Soviet head of state, also worked at the same factory as Oswald and was even assigned to help him improve his Russian.
[00:11:08] In Minsk, Oswald met a lady called Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova, and they married on April 30th of 1961.
[00:11:18] According to a man called Peter Savodnik, who wrote a book about Oswald’s time in Minsk, Oswald defection was as psychological as it was ideological, or political.
[00:11:31] Though Oswald did want to be in the USSR and do his part for communism, Savodnik argues that “he went there because he didn't fit in anywhere else, he was a desperate and lonely young man who believed that in Russia he would be rescued."
[00:11:48] Oswald was, it seems, still looking, yearning for somewhere he could feel at home.
[00:11:55] But Soviet life began to wear on the young man, and in February of 1962, he wrote to the U.S Embassy to report that the Soviet authorities were holding him and his wife against their will, and that he wanted to return to the United States.
[00:12:13] Because he had never formally renounced his American citizenship, in June of 1962, Oswald was given a temporary US passport, allowed to return to his homeland and arrived in New York with his Soviet wife and three-month old daughter.
[00:12:31] The family quickly moved to Dallas, in Texas, and Oswald travelled to New Orleans to look for work.
[00:12:39] Struggling to hold a job down, he began engaging in political activity, claiming that he was a representative of a pro-Castro organisation called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
[00:12:51] The New York headquarters of this organisation, however, denied having any knowledge of him.
[00:12:57] One can only imagine what must have been going on in his head at the time, but we do know for sure what he did next.
[00:13:05] In March of 1963, less than a year after returning home, back to the United States, he used an alias, or fake name, and bought two guns: a rifle, and a revolver.
[00:13:18] Now, many people aren’t aware of this next part.
[00:13:22] But Oswald actually had a test run, a practice, to try out his new weapon.
[00:13:29] Around a month after buying his rifle, and just months before he would shoot Kennedy, Oswald took his rifle to the home of an American general, a man called Major General Edwin Walker, and shot through a window as Walker sat at his desk.
[00:13:48] Walker, who was a very vocal anti-communist voice in American society, escaped without any injuries.
[00:13:56] The assailant was never caught, and it was only after Oswald's death that it was revealed to have been him.
[00:14:04] When he returned to New Orleans, he took part in a local radio debate and proudly declared himself a Marxist, and in August of 1963 he was arrested for distributing pro-Castro propaganda.
[00:14:19] Strangely enough, he was still given a full foreign travel passport – despite the fact that he was known to the American authorities and had been interrogated by the F.B.I and C.I.A when he returned from the USSR.
[00:14:35] Using this new passport, Oswald travelled to Mexico for a few weeks, where he visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies and tried to arrange to travel to the Soviet Union via Cuba.
[00:14:48] When he returned to the U.S, he was still looking for work, that was, until a Russian-speaking friend who had been helping Oswald’s wife mentioned that a neighbour knew of a job opportunity - at a book depository in Dallas.
[00:15:04] Little did the neighbour know that their kind offer had unknowingly set the scene for the assassination of the President of the United States.
[00:15:15] In Dallas, Oswald rented a single room under the name O H Lee and began working at the book depository, or warehouse, only returning to see his family in the suburbs on weekends.
[00:15:29] According to the owner of the boarding house where he stayed during the week, Oswald didn’t interact with many of the other residents, only worked and made phone calls.
[00:15:39] “They were local phone calls and he always made them in a foreign language." they said. "I think it was German, or maybe Russian. He was really considerate about it. If other people were wanting to phone he would wait. He was just about as good a tenant as we could wish to have.”
[00:15:55] In November of 1963, it was announced that President Kennedy would be visiting Dallas, and several local newspapers published the route that the President’s motorcade would be taking.
[00:16:09] It passed, of course, the Texas School Book Depository - Oswald’s place of work.
[00:16:17] On the night of Thursday the 21st, Oswald unexpectedly returned to his family home and spent the night - something that he only ever really did at weekends.
[00:16:29] The next morning, on Friday the 22nd, Oswald’s 19-year-old neighbour, Wesley Frazier, gave him a lift to work.
[00:16:38] Frazier noticed that Oswald was carrying a long, heavy parcel.
[00:16:44] It was, Oswald told him, “just some window blinds which I’m taking downtown to get fixed.”
[00:16:51] At 12:30pm that afternoon, on the 22nd of November, Oswald set up his rifle on the sixth floor of the depository building.
[00:17:03] He waited for the motorcade to pass, and fired three shots that killed President Kennedy as his car passed through Dealey Plaza.
[00:17:12] Well, as we will discuss in the next episode, that’s the official story.
[00:17:18] As the President’s car sped away and the crowd down in the plaza tried to make sense of what was going on, Oswald fled the scene and took a bus.
[00:17:28] But as there was such a buzz of police activity in Dealey Plaza, the city quickly filled with traffic.
[00:17:35] Oswald got out and took a taxi back to his boarding house, sitting in the front seat as was common in the Soviet Union.
[00:17:44] The driver, who hadn’t yet heard the news of the President’s assassination, asked Oswald what all the police sirens were for, not knowing that he was sitting next to the assassin.
[00:17:57] Oswald said nothing, and stayed silent for the entire journey.
[00:18:02] The driver would later say that he thought Oswald was “a wino two days off the bottle,” meaning an alcoholic experiencing withdrawal symptoms.
[00:18:13] He dropped him off a few minutes from the boarding house, and after checking the coast was clear, after checking the police weren’t following him, Oswald went inside.
[00:18:24] The only person there was a housekeeper, Earlene Roberts, who was sitting watching the television, having heard the news of the President’s assassination just minutes before.
[00:18:35] Around 1pm Oswald, or “Mr. Lee” as he was known to the other residents, arrived and rushed across the living-room into his bedroom.
[00:18:45] “You’re in a hurry, aren’t you?” Roberts asked him, but Oswald did not respond.
[00:18:51] He left again moments later in a different jacket, a pistol stuffed into the waistband of his trousers.
[00:18:59] Back at the Texas Book Depository, where police officers were now searching, certain that that was where the shots had come from, the supervisor told police
[00:19:09] that only one man was missing: Lee Harvey Oswald.
[00:19:15] At 1.15pm Oswald was stopped by a Dallas police patrolman named J.D Tippit, who thought he matched the suspect’s description already being passed around on the police radio.
[00:19:28] Oswald shot and killed Tippit with his revolver, and around half an hour later, at 1.45pm, Oswald was captured in the Texas Theatre.
[00:19:40] By 7pm, less than 7 hours after he had pulled the trigger, he had been formally charged with the murder of President Kennedy, and by then news of Kennedy’s assassination had spread around the world.
[00:19:56] Oswald, the outcast Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union, had shot dead the President of the United States.
[00:20:06] So why did he do it?
[00:20:09] According to one of Oswald’s friends, Paul Gregory, he didn’t even particularly dislike Kennedy.
[00:20:16] In fact, the family kept a copy of Time Magazine with Kennedy on the front cover on display in their home.
[00:20:23] Priscilla McMillan, a friend of Oswald’s wife, even said that “Lee liked Kennedy.”
[00:20:29] “He liked him in civil rights. He disliked him for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba,” she said. “But insofar as he spoke about Kennedy, it was to praise him.”
[00:20:39] As we’ll see in the next episode, there are many, many different theories as to why - and indeed how - Oswald killed Kennedy.
[00:20:50] But if we accept the official version of events for a moment, perhaps Oswald, despite actually quite admiring Kennedy on a personal level, decided that killing him was the best way to send a political, or ideological message.
[00:21:07] With Cold War tensions at their peak in 1963, maybe Oswald thought that killing the symbol of American power - the president - would please the Soviet Union and that he would, finally, find the place he belonged, the place he had been searching for his entire life.
[00:21:27] But as you probably know, this is not the end of the story of Lee Harvey Oswald.
[00:21:34] On the morning of the 24th, less than 48 hours after shooting JFK, Oswald was being led through the underground car park of the Dallas police station to be transferred to an interrogation office.
[00:21:48] The small space was filled with a crowd of reporters and police officers, and there was very little security.
[00:21:56] Nonetheless, Oswald was taken through the crowd with two officers by his side.
[00:22:03] James Leavelle, one of the Dallas police officers who was at his side, later said, “I put the handcuffs on him, and in the process of doing that, I more in jest kind of said, ‘Lee, if anybody shoots at you, I hope they’re as good a shot as you are.”
[00:22:20] Oswald, he said, “kind of laughed and he said, ‘Oh, you’re being melodramatic,’ or something to that effect. ‘Nobody’s going to shoot at me.'”
[00:22:30] Anyway, as Oswald emerged from the station, a man named Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner with ties to the Chicago underworld, approached Oswald and shot him in the stomach.
[00:22:45] Everyone stood around in shock for a second, as Oswald screamed and fell to the floor.
[00:22:53] He was taken to Parkland Memorial hospital - the same hospital where Kennedy died just two days before.
[00:23:01] At 1.07pm, Oswald was pronounced dead.
[00:23:08] As the incident was being broadcast on television, millions of Americans watched Oswald’s assassination live.
[00:23:17] As you may know, I’ve just given you the official version of events.
[00:23:22] That Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone was the final conclusion of the Warren Commission - the body set up to investigate the assassination.
[00:23:31] Yet the assassination of John F. Kennedy [and Oswald’s role in it] is perhaps the most popular conspiracy theory of all time.
[00:23:40] It is, you could say, the mother of all conspiracy theories - the one that even the most rational, trusting people believe has some truth to it.
[00:23:52] For many people, something about that day in 1963 smelled fishy, it just wasn’t quite right.
[00:24:01] Whether it be Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union, and conspiracies that he was a Soviet hitman sent to strike a blow in the Cold War, or Jack Ruby’s mafia connections - indeed, Kennedy’s supposed mafia connections.
[00:24:15] Or even the fact that he was walked through an open car park with minimal security just days after assassinating the President of the United States.
[00:24:26] Many Americans don’t believe the Warren Commission’s findings; that a lone gunman, one man alone, could kill the President.
[00:24:35] A Gallup poll from March of 2001 found that 81 percent of Americans believed there were other people involved in Kennedy’s death.
[00:24:45] Just 13 percent believed that Oswald acted alone.
[00:24:51] Indeed, the focus of the next episode, a follow-up to this one, will be some of the most widely-believed conspiracy theories about what really happened on that fateful November afternoon.
[00:25:04] But it is important to remember that Oswald was, at the very least, involved.
[00:25:10] He was a US Marine who defected to the Soviet Union, afterall.
[00:25:15] A trained marksman who hated American capitalism and everything it represented.
[00:25:21] A man who, wherever he went in the world, never seemed to quite fit in and lived a mysterious life, travelling around and interacting with political radicals, Soviet and Cuban spies.
[00:25:35] Some say he was personally instructed to kill Kennedy by the leader of the Soviet Union, others say Oswald was the gunman in the biggest mob killing of all time.
[00:25:47] There are few who debate that Lee Harvey Oswald pulled the trigger, but to the question of “why”, and “with whose help?”, well that is a question that seems like it might never truly be solved.
[00:26:04] OK then, that is it for today’s episode on Lee Harvey Oswald - the man who killed the president.
[00:26:11] I hope it was an interesting one, and whether you knew a lot about Lee Harvey Oswald, or you didn’t know much about his backstory at all, well I hope you learned something new.
[00:26:21] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:26:25] Why do you think Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F. Kennedy?
[00:26:29] Do you believe he was the only person involved?
[00:26:32] How might the world have been different if the bullets had missed?
[00:26:37] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:26:40] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:26:48] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:26:53] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
