Oswald Born: JFK's Accused Assassin Enters the World

Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, and killed by Jack Ruby on live television two days later before he could be tried. He was twenty-four. Born in New Orleans on October 18, 1939, his father died two months before his birth, and his mother moved the family repeatedly through Texas and New York. He joined the Marines at seventeen, where he served as a radar operator at the Atsugi air base in Japan, a facility that housed CIA U-2 surveillance flights. He defected to the Soviet Union in 1959, arriving in Moscow and attempting to renounce his American citizenship at the U.S. embassy. He lived in Minsk for two and a half years, married a Russian woman named Marina Prusakova, and then returned to the United States in 1962 with apparent ease, a fact that has fueled conspiracy theories ever since. In the months before the assassination, he distributed pro-Castro leaflets in New Orleans, attempted to travel to Cuba through the Soviet embassy in Mexico City, and purchased a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle by mail order. Whether he acted alone remains the most argued question in American political history. The Warren Commission concluded in 1964 that Oswald was the sole assassin. The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded in 1979 that a conspiracy was probable, based on disputed acoustic evidence. Oswald never stood trial. His murder by Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner with connections to organized crime, eliminated the only person who could have answered definitively. The case remains officially open.