Back from the USSR: Lee Harvey Oswald, Antihero (a Conspiracy-free Theory)

Don't worry:  I'm not one of those Kennedy-assassination conspiracy theorists.  I acknowledge that diligent investigators (including the 1964 Warren Commission's) and credible forensic scientists have established beyond a reasonable doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in murdering the president on that sad, sunny Dallas day in November 1963.  Yet I admit that there was a string of pretty weird coincidences in this case. 

A new book has satisfactorily answered most of my lingering questions about the killer.  Oliver Stone, perpetrator of the 1991 paranoid fantasy film JFK, might be disappointed by what its author discovered about that homicidal nudnik named Oswald.  Jacob Rubenstein, a nightclub owner who preferred to be called Jack Ruby, may have sincerely meant to avenge the dead president by firing a bullet into his assassin.  Unfortunately, by killing that smirking self-proclaimed "patsy," Ruby - the hotheaded agent of retribution - merely enhanced Oswald's mystique.

In his brief but meticulously researched study, The Interloper:  Lee Harvey Oswald Inside the Soviet Union (NY:  Basic Books, 2013), journalist Peter Savodnik presents a convincing account of the damaging circumstances of Oswald's life, as well as the dangerous quirks of his alienated psyche, that led the ex-marine to take such violent action.  

Ironically, within a month of moving back to Dallas in March 1963, the confused "Marxist" attempted to murder ex-general Edwin Walker, who'd been forced into early retirement by JFK.  Oswald just missed the right-wing extremist Walker, using the same Carcano 6.5-mm bolt-action rifle that he later used to fatally shoot Kennedy, simultaneously wounding Governor Connally.  Then, in a futile attempt to evade arrest, the cowardly Oswald shot Officer J. D. Tippit dead with a handgun.   

A reporter formerly based in Moscow, Savodnik pays particular attention to the two and a half years that the future assassin spent in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Byelorussia (since 1991, the independent state of Belarus, still a de facto dictatorship).  By all eyewitness accounts, Oswald was a lazy, disgruntled metal lathe operator at the Minsk Radio Factory to which the Soviets assigned him in January 1960.  

The public's fascination with Oswald partly stems from the fact that he was one of only eleven Americans who defected to the USSR between 1958 and 1964, perhaps the tensest period of the Cold War.  After a meandering journey - by freighter from New Orleans to France, followed by a flight from London to Helsinki - Oswald entered Russia from Finland by train on October 15, 1959.  

He was carrying a one-week tourist visa in his passport and not much else.  After the Soviet authorities denied his immediate request to stay and seek citizenship, Oswald made a suicidal gesture at the Moscow hotel where his puzzled handlers were keeping him.  Ultimately, after giving interviews to American and Soviet reporters, Oswald was granted a residence permit.  

It was either an impressive accomplishment or a stroke of luck, considering that the KGB had already determined he had zero intelligence value.  Despite a stint as a radar operator at Atsugi Air Base, which controlled U-2 spy-plane flights to and from Japan, Oswald offered no information unknown to the Soviet military.

So how did this traitorous, failed Communist interloper gain re-entry to the USA without facing criminal charges?  After all, Oswald had tried to renounce his American citizenship at the US embassy in Moscow.  He had eagerly cooperated with his disappointed KGB interrogators.  Although the Soviet government was glad to see this unstable foreigner finally leave in mid-1962, his defection had initially given them a propaganda coup.  

In an absurd twist of fate, the superpowers' public-relations battle allowed Oswald to escape punishment by either side.  His sudden marriage to Marina Prusakova in 1961, and the subsequent birth of their first daughter in Minsk, probably helped expedite his reverse-exodus.  After several months of bureaucratic delay (the main obstacle was posed by the Immigration & Naturalization Service, which understandably questioned Oswald's loyalty), American authorities reluctantly granted entrance visas to Mr. and Mrs. Oswald in May 1962. 

Apparently afraid of appearing to be less hospitable and forgiving than the Soviets had been to him, US officials also gave Oswald a $435.71 repatriation loan, documents show.  The State Department's generosity allowed him to travel with his new family - albeit modestly, by train and ship - from Moscow to New Jersey via the Netherlands.  

Savodnik asserts that the solution to the now 50-year-long Oswald enigma (i.e. why did he kill JFK?) is rooted in his having been, essentially, a delusional Cold War antihero.  It's as good an explanation as any I've come across.  "Oswald was an ordinary man," the author notes, "but he was also exceptional, and not just because he killed a president."  

"Once [the USSR government] capitulated to his demand that he be allowed to stay in the Soviet Union, he was elevated, almost magically, with a great and sudden force," Savodnik writes.  "For the first time, he had done something that most other men could not have imagined doing:  he had convinced the KGB to let him stay in their country. . . He was not a sympathetic character, but he had admirable traits - perseverance, concentration. . . He had done something profound."  

"In any event," Savodnik concludes, "it is hard to imagine any other type of American besides the would-be antihero venturing to the Soviet Union in 1959 and mustering the will to stay there for as long as Oswald did.  This was the quintessential antiheroic experience of the period, the bridge that the loner or rebel would have had to cross in order to detach himself fully from his beginnings. [. . .]  Ironically, Oswald's antiheroism appears to have contributed to his feelings of estrangement not only from America but also, eventually, from the Soviet Union."

Case closed?  Don't count on it.  Conspiracy theorizing is an insidious hobby, a hard habit for obsessive types to break.  Especially when it involves the slight, miserable 24-year-old murderer who sealed the myth of Kennedy's Camelot on the Potomac.  In retrospect, the US government should not have been so welcoming to that ungrateful un-defector.  With a few shots from his cheap rifle, sent by mail-order from Klein's Sporting Goods in Chicago, Oswald changed history. 

All the available evidence, including the now unclassified KGB files, indicates that Oswald was not serving the USSR - or Castro, the Mafia, the CIA, some military-industrial cabal, LBJ, or anyone but himself - when he aimed a powerful weapon through the open sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository.  He certainly wasn't doing his fellow Americans any favors.