3 Things You May Not Know About Lee Harvey Oswald

Lee Harvey Oswald was the alleged killer of President John F. Kennedy. Learn more about his life before and after Jack Ruby killed him.

 

Lee Harvey Oswald was a former US Marine gunned down by Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner in Dallas. His death didn’t leave any doubt as to who killed him, which is less than one can say for the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

 

Here’s a Kennedys and King perspective on the life of the former marksman.

1. He was a sharpshooter in the Marine Corps

 

Lee Harvey Oswald was in the US Marines from 1956–59. He dropped out of high school only to score high enough to be assigned as a sharpshooter in the Marine Corps. Yet, on his second go-round in 1959, he did rather poorly and barely qualified for the lowest category marksman.

 

The Warren Commission tried to insinuate bad weather into that later result, but Mark Lane looked up the US Weather Bureau records. It was sunny and bright that day, with no rain. Oswald ended up being a radar operator.

 

2. He Defected to the Former Soviet Union

 

A mere nine days after his discharge from the Marines, Oswald set sail for the Soviet Union. He somehow knew which European city handed out the fastest visas to get into the USSR: Helsinki. He stayed in two five-star hotels while there, which is rather odd for an alleged impoverished former Marine.  

 

Once in Moscow, he threatened to give out radar secrets. But the American embassy talked him out of revoking his US citizenship, while the Soviets would not let him apply for Soviet citizenship. They sent him 400 miles away to Minsk, in present-day Belarus. There, he met his wife, Marina Prusakova, soon to become Marina Oswald. They had two daughters.

 

3. The Warren Commission Convicted Oswald

 

The Warren Commission was a botched inquiry into John Kennedy’s death. The two main investigatory bodies, the FBI and the Secret Service, gave faulty, and sometimes, outright false information to the Commission. And the Commissioners accepted most of it.

 

The Commission declared that Oswald killed President Kennedy acting alone and Jack Ruby killed Oswald acting alone. These judgments were dubious when rendered in 1964. Today they have been exposed as utterly false.

 

The truth behind the JFK assassination remains hidden to this day. But platforms like Kennedys and King are working hard to uncover it. Read their archives to know more about the political assassinations of the 1960s and the air of mystery surrounding them.

 

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