Lee Harvey Oswald (October 18, 1939 – November 24, 1963) was a U.S. Marine veteran, who assassinated John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, on November 22, 1963.
Oswald was placed in juvenile detention at age twelve for truancy, during which he was assessed by a psychiatrist as "emotionally disturbed" because of the lack of normal family life. He attended twelve schools in his youth, quitting repeatedly, and at age seventeen he joined the Marines, where he was court-martialed twice and jailed. He also became interested in Marxism from a young age. In 1959, he was discharged from active duty into the Marine Corps Reserve, then flew to Europe and defected to the Soviet Union. He lived in Minsk, married a Russian woman named Marina, and had a daughter. In June 1962, he returned to the United States with his wife, and eventually settled in Dallas, Texas, where their second daughter was born. Oswald still continued to express support for the Soviet Union and Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
Oswald shot and killed Kennedy on November 22, 1963, from a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository as Kennedy traveled by motorcade through Dealey Plaza in Dallas. About 45 minutes after shooting Kennedy, Oswald murdered a Dallas police officer, J. D. Tippit, on a suburban street. He then slipped into a movie theater, where he was arrested for Tippit's murder. Oswald was charged with the assassination of Kennedy, but he denied responsibility for the killing, claiming that he was a patsy. Two days later, Oswald himself was murdered by a local nightclub owner, Jack Ruby, on live television in the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters.
In September 1964, the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald and Ruby had each acted alone. This conclusion, though controversial, was supported by investigations from the Dallas Police Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the United States Secret Service, and the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). Despite forensic, ballistic, and eyewitness accounts supporting the official findings, public-opinion polls have shown that most Americans still do not believe that the official version tells the whole truth of the events, and the assassination has spawned numerous conspiracy theories.
Lee Harvey Oswald was born at the old French Hospital in New Orleans, Louisiana, on October 18, 1939, to a MetLife worker Robert Edward Lee Oswald Sr. (1896–1939) and a legal clerk Marguerite Frances Claverie (1907–1981). Robert Oswald was a third cousin of President Theodore Roosevelt and a distant cousin of Confederate general Robert E. Lee and served as a sergeant in the U.S. Army during World War I. Robert died of a heart attack two months before Lee was born. Lee's elder brother Robert Jr. (1934–2017) was a U.S. Marine during the Korean War. Through Marguerite's first marriage to Edward John Pic Jr., Lee and Robert Jr. were the half-brothers of U.S. Air Force veteran John Edward Pic (1932–2000).
He spent much of his first three years living with his uncle and aunt Charles and Lillian Murret. Lee Oswald and his two brothers, Robert and John, were placed in the Evangelical Lutheran Bethlehem Orphan Asylum in 1942, ages 3, 7, and 9. Robert and John had been there throughout in 1942, while Lee was admitted in December. The applications for the children indicated that Marguerite was to pay $10 per child per month to the asylum, plus clothing and shoes. All of them had been baptized into the Lutheran Church at this time.
In 1943, Marguerite met Edwin Eckdahl. They had decided to marry by January 1944, but these plans were delayed. Lee Oswald was released from the asylum in January 1944 upon the request of Marguerite. Marguerite moved from New Orleans to Dallas, Texas in early 1944, taking Lee with her but leaving the older boys in the asylum. The older boys joined them in June 1944.
Marguerite married Edwin Eckdahl in May 1945, beginning a brief time that the couple and three boys were in the same home. Lee found Eckdahl to be the "father he never had."
This time with all five together was short-lived. In the fall of 1945, the older boys were enrolled in a military academy in Mississippi, which they attended for the next three years. The Eckdahls moved to a suburb of Fort Worth. By lying about the boy's age, Marguerite enrolled Lee in the first grade in 1945. Over the next six years, Lee attended several different schools in the Fort Worth area through the sixth grade.
In February 1946, Lee was admitted to a hospital in Fort Worth for a mastoidectomy on the left side of his head. After some marital difficulties between Marguerite and Eckdahl, Lee's mother and Lee moved to Covington, Louisiana for a brief time. Records indicate that Lee Oswald attended Covington Grammar School in Covington, Louisiana from September 1946 to January 1947, enrolled as a first grade student again. Edwin Eckdahl convinced Marguerite to continue their marriage. The Eckdahls, now reconciled, moved back to Fort Worth in 1947. That arrangement would only last until 1948 amidst a heated separation and divorce process.
The Oswald family (Marguerite, Robert, and Lee Oswald; John Pic) was in the Fort Worth area following the divorce. Lee took an IQ test in the fourth grade and scored 103, and "on achievement tests in grades 4 to 6, he twice did best in reading and twice did worst in spelling."
As a child Oswald was described as withdrawn and temperamental by several people who knew him. When Oswald was 12 in August 1952, his mother took him to New York City where they lived for a short time with Oswald's half-brother, John. Oswald and his mother were later asked to leave after an argument in which Oswald allegedly struck his mother and threatened John's wife with a pocket knife.
Oswald attended seventh grade in the Bronx, New York City, but was often truant, which led to a psychiatric assessment at a juvenile reformatory. The reformatory psychiatrist, Dr. Renatus Hartogs, described Oswald as immersed in a "vivid fantasy life, turning around the topics of omnipotence and power, through which [Oswald] tries to compensate for his present shortcomings and frustrations". Hartogs concluded:
Lee has to be diagnosed as "personality pattern disturbance with schizoid features and passive-aggressive tendencies". 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.
Hartogs recommended that Lee be placed on probation on condition that he seek help and guidance through a child guidance clinic, and that Oswald seek "psychotherapeutic guidance through contact with a family agency". Evelyn D. Siegel, a social worker who interviewed both Lee and Marguerite Oswald at Youth House, while describing "a rather pleasant, appealing quality about this emotionally starved, affectionless youngster which grows as one speaks to him", found that he had detached himself from the world around him because "no one in it ever met any of his needs for love". Hartogs and Siegel indicated that Marguerite gave him very little affection, with Siegel concluding that Lee "just felt that his mother never gave a damn for him. He always felt like a burden that she simply just had to tolerate." Furthermore, his mother did not apparently indicate an awareness of the relationship between her conduct and her son's psychological problems, with Siegel describing Marguerite as a "defensive, rigid, self-involved person who had real difficulty in accepting and relating to people" and who had "little understanding" of Lee's behavior and of the "protective shell he has drawn around himself". Hartogs reported that she did not understand that Lee's withdrawal was a form of "violent but silent protest against his neglect by her and represents his reaction to a complete absence of any real family life".
When Oswald returned to school for the 1953 Fall semester, his disciplinary problems continued. When he failed to cooperate with school authorities, they sought a court order to remove him from his mother's care so he could be placed into a home for boys to complete his education. This was postponed, perhaps partially because his behavior abruptly improved. Before the New York family court system could address their case, the Oswalds left New York in January 1954, and returned to New Orleans.