TIME - Man of the Year/CompactPublishing-TimeMagazine-TimeManOfTheYear-Win31MSDOS.iso/moy/kennedy/kennedy.08d

Text File | 1992-08-29 | 7.0 KB | 129 lines

                                                                                November 29, 1963

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 a lot 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 "sharp-shooter,"
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.