October 20, 2025 • 45 mins
60 years after he was arrested for killing President John F. Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald remains one of the most enigmatic figures of the 20th century — and a lightning rod for conspiracy theorists everywhere. Today, we’re joined by Peter Savodnik, author of the book The Interloper: Lee Harvey Oswald Inside of the Soviet Union, to unpack Oswald’s tumultuous life and legacy.
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
I'm George Severis and this is United States of Kennedy,
a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty.
Every week we go into one aspect of the Kennedy story,
and today we are talking about Lee Harvey Oswald. Sixty
years after the jfk assassination, the man arrested for killing him,
remains one of the most enigmatic figures of the twentieth
(00:28):
century and a lightning rod for conspiracy theorists everywhere. The
Warring Commission, the committee assembled to investigate the jfk assassination,
described Oswald as quote profoundly alienated from the world in
which he lived. Oswald had a tumultuous childhood. His father
died two months before he was born, and his mother
placed him in an orphanage when he was just three
(00:49):
years old. He attended twelve different schools as a child,
eventually joining the Marines when he was seventeen. Paradoxically, around
this time, he also developed an interest in communism and
the writings of Karl Marx. He eventually moved to the
Soviet Union, finding himself in the unusual position of being
an American expat living in Minsk during the height of
(01:10):
the Cold War. After moving back to the United States,
spending time in Dallas and the New Orleans, he became
even more isolated and his complicated and contradictory political beliefs
turned violent. At the mere age of twenty four, he
was arrested for killing JFK. Just two days later, as
he was being transferred from the city jail to the
county jail, a man named Jack Ruby shot him in
(01:32):
the stomach on live TV. Oswald died in the ambulance
on the way to Parkland Memorial Hospital, the same hospital
where JFK was pronounced dead two days earlier. Today, to
unpack Oswald's life and legacy, we are joined by Peter Savatnik,
senior editor at The Free Press and author of the
book The Interloper Lee Harvey Oswald Inside of the Soviet Union. Peter,
(01:54):
thank you for joining us. Great to be here. So
I want to get into Lee's early childhood and how
he got to be this kind of infamous figure. So
before we get into the specifics, tell me a little
bit about Lee Harvey Oswald's childhood.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
It's a childhood that's characterized by constant instability movement. So
all the core constituents that go into a happy, healthy
childhood were mostly, if not entirely absent. A reliable mother,
reliable father, a single place where you might live, a
(02:31):
single school or maybe one or two or three schools
over the many years that you attend, a community friends,
all the things that make up a normal upbringing and
that provide kids with a sense of place in the world.
That's all absent in his case. And so there's this
bouncing around from Texas to Louisiana. They go up to
(02:54):
New York for a little while, they come back, and
there is this rhythm that emerge. Every year and a half,
there's like a major rupture, and everything's uprooted. This is
all because of his mother, I should add Marguerite, who
is not well, and it usually it's because of some
kind of romantic trouble or work trouble, and they're always
(03:17):
scrambling for money, and so everything is uprooted, and they
go and then they settle down, and this time he's
told everything's gonna be better, and it's gonna be calm
and good, and of course that never happens because his
mother is the same person always, the only person in
his life who provides some semblance of normal sior stability.
(03:37):
Is his older brother, but he's a good bit older
and he's really on his own, and so it's a lonely, sad,
parapatetic kind of lifestyle that unlikely to lead anything good
or productive.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
And his father passes away a few months before he's born, right, right,
and then his mom ends up sending both his older
brothers to an orphanage and then eventually him, But he's
also in and out. I was unclear as to whether
he was living full time at the orphanage or he
was also living with his mother.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
I think it's sort of a little bit ill defined
for a bit. You know, you have the one through
line in his life is people organizations kind of filling
in the gaps when his mother simply couldn't pull together.
That the orphanage plays that role. But I think it's
the same pattern always, which is the normal things that
we expect a mother or a father to do can't
(04:33):
be expected to be provided for. And so here is
this constant casting about, the scrambling, and this looking and
wondering about where am I, Who am I? Where do
I go next? And there's a kind of fear and
a kind of an angstiness about Oswald that you can
sense is developing by the time he's in his early teens.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
Right, And so speaking of that, he's in his teens
in New York and he's of ostracize at school. Everyone
sees him as kind of odd. This is around when
he's starting to get interested in politics, and Marxist politics specifically.
So what is that like as a teen? How does
he get politicized?
Speaker 2 (05:12):
You know, it is a little bit tricky to answer,
because Oswald attempted to impose some kind of order on
his own thinking his own evolution later when he was
in the Soviet Union and then actually.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
After he left it.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
So he's viewing himself through the prism of the previous
five to ten years, and he's doing so with a
very very limited understanding of the ideas politics, geopolitics that
he's immersed in, and with a very very limited understanding
of himself. So the way he tells it is, he
(05:49):
leaves high school, he joins the Marines early, and he's
initially very excited about being a part of the Marines.
That he's not so surprising that the father fee that
is the military, imposing order on his life but it
turns out that that's hard too, because there are expectations
baked into that agreement, to that obligation. You have to
(06:11):
get up at a certain time, you have to adhere
to a certain code of conduct, you have to respect
your superior officers. All the things that go into making
a large organization like the Marines work with the punctilious
nature of any serious military organization. So it's very exacting,
and he just doesn't have the wherewithal, the determination, the
(06:32):
clarity of purpose to see it through. I think had
he been smarter, had he had somebody in his life
who had said to him, look, just get through this
chapter in your life, complete this one thing, and it
will give you an enormous sense of confidence. It will
be a boost that will set you on a different
course that might have led to a different outcome. But
there was no one like that in his life. And
(06:53):
so the same pattern ithres while he's in Japan, based
with the Marines overseas that he started to get into
a lot of trouble, and then inevitably he finds other outlets.
The way he describes is he comes into contact with
ideas emanating from the Soviet and communist worlds, and he's
fascinated by that, and in a way, they offer the
(07:16):
same thing that the Marines offered. It was this very
deadly serious mission.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
It was very kind of manly.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
It was tough, it was strong, but it was just new,
and it was something he hadn't yet messed up, and
so he could begin to fantasize about going to the
Soviet Union and recreating himself there in the way that
he had hoped to have recreated himself in the Marines.
And that's of course what he ultimately attempts to do.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
One of the very obvious contradictions here with his ideology,
which I'm sure is due to the fact that he
is largely self educated and also just incredibly young. I mean,
he's seventeen when he joins the Marines, is this contradiction
between his espoused communist slash Marxist views and his desire
to be in the Marines, which you would think are
(08:06):
to opposite instincts, and he doesn't necessarily abandon one for
the other. In fact, when he's in the Marines, he
famously is reading Marx and talking to those around him
about Marxist philosophy and communism. So how did his superiors
even allow that to continue as long as it did,
and how does he reconcile those beliefs in his own head.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Among people in his immediate orbit, there was an awareness
that Oswald was into Communism, and they would poke fun
at him. There was some name calling, but he was
a grunt. Ultimately, you're free to read what you want
to read, you can say what you want to say,
as long as you play by the rules. You know, Okay,
(08:52):
you're entitled to believe crazy ideas. That was I think
the attitude that the Marines had. The problem is that
as he became more serious about his Marxism, and again
it's important to understand, as you know, he is self educated,
and I think that's a very generous way of putting it.
You know, he had these very kind of fragmented, distorted,
stereotypical kind of notions or cartoonish ideas about the Soviet
(09:14):
Union and communism. His understanding of history is very, very porous.
So all this winds up getting kind of retrofitted into
you know, this picture, this scenario that he's painting for himself,
and he's imagining himself in and going to and joining
and being a part of and so I think as
his gels in his head, and he becomes more serious
(09:34):
about it, and he begins to think about how this actually
might unfold concretely. Then it becomes harder and harder for
him to be a good marine, and ultimately he applies
to get discharged early, just like he left to join
the Marines early, and he's allowed to do so, not
by a lot, but it's sort of symbolic in a way.
He's so eager to leave, he's so eager to jumped
(09:56):
to his next phase, to escape to that that he
has to get out of wherever he is before he's
actually supposed to get out.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
We're going to take a short break, stay with us,
and we're back with United States of Kennedy. There seems
to be this pattern that he's always laser focused on
(10:27):
a specific goal, and that interest lasts for maybe one
to two years, and then he sort of moves on
to the next thing. And I think that can be
a political commitment, it can be an obsession with one
specific figure. It can be an obsession with one specific
location that he wants to move to because he feels
like there would be a better life there. And again
something I kept going back to as I was reading
(10:47):
about him, is just like the jfk assassination happened when
he was only twenty four. All of this is as
he's basically, you know, what we would think of as
college age, which is when people think of him as
this mastermind or radicalized. But you know, it's important to
keep that in mind. But he's like eighteen, nineteen, twenty
years old. So he leaves the Marines, and then, of course,
(11:07):
and this is what your book is about, is his
time in the Soviet Union, which happens right after he
leaves the Marine. So obviously, for an American to manage
being an expat over there at the time, in the
peak of the Cold War was an incredibly strange thing.
So what was the process like by which he went
from being an ex marine in the US to going
(11:29):
to Moscow?
Speaker 2 (11:32):
So you're absolutely right, it was very strange. What Oswald
didn't appreciate is that the Soviets had seen this before
many times. They'd been seeing it for decades, and he
was by then a cliche that the disaffected, alienated young
American who is sort of ideologically excited, feverish and is
(11:55):
lost at home is a failure at home and thinks
that in the Soviet Union he will recreate himself, he
will become the man he's supposed to be. And so
by the time he gets there, recall that it's the
late fifties, Joseph Stalin has been dead at this point
for six years. Nikity Koushov is the leader. They're unsurprised
(12:18):
by Oswald. The only question that the KGB had for
him or about him was is he useful to us
at all? Does he know anything? And Oswald seems to
sense this or know this, and he makes a big
point when he's interviewed by the KGB that he was
at this base in Japan where there were the U
two spy planes. And as you may know, the U
two spy planes at the time were this top secret
(12:41):
program that the Eisenhower administration had been running capturing very
sensitive information in the Soviet Union. We had denied that
we were doing it, Soviets knew that we were doing it,
but publicly weed that we were doing it. The problem
from the Soviet vantage point was that they didn't have
any missiles that were powerful enough to reach the spy planes.
So he had all these these syplanes that were flying
(13:01):
in a very very high altitude of very powerful cameras,
and the Soviets couldn't take them out. And so the
question that the KGB had it was very simple, was
did Oswald know anything that would have helped them in
any way build a missile or take down these spy planes?
And it quickly became abundantly clear to them that he
(13:22):
knew nothing. They knew more about the spy planes than
he did. And so he's there for a grand total
of six days.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
When they tell him you're going to have to go.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
They don't want him there because he's a liability, he's unstable,
and they've seen this before. They know that he's not
going to be useful to them, and he's just going
to be a high visibility kind of problem. An American
ex marine in Moscow is a problem. And so what
does Otispal do? Not Surprisingly, he goes back to his hotel.
He attempts to kill himself, but he does a very
(13:53):
half hearted job and he sort of slits his wrists.
He winds up at his hospital.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
I've been there.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
It's just north of the center of Moscow. He's treated
and the Russians are kind of not sure what to do,
because he's attempted to kill himself, but in an attempt
that hard, and so the KGB when they find him,
he's been bleeding seriously, but he's not actually on the
precipice of death. He's just he needs to be seen
(14:22):
by a doctor and patched up. But he's you know,
more predictable ways of killing oneself, and Oswald didn't avail
himself with those ways. So anyway, he's treated and then
he's told, okay, fine, you want to stay, you can stay.
And then they do what they've done many times before
with disaffected Westerners who have come to the Soviet Union
hoping to recreate themselves. They send them to some boring,
(14:45):
out of the way provincial town and they say, okay,
you want the Soviet experience, We're going to give you
the Soviet experience. And they send him to Minsk, which
is the quintessential Soviet city in the sense that had
been utterly demolished during the war. During World War Two,
it was a disaster. I think more people were murdered
in Mints between the Nazis and the Soviets than possibly
(15:09):
in the other city in the Soviet Union. But it
was an utterly just destroyed place. And at the time,
remember we're only fourteen years removed from the end of
the war, so it's still in the midst of rebuilding,
very much so. And they send him there and he's
put up in this actually by Soviet standards, in a
very nice apartment.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
He has it to himself, which was very unusual.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
And he's given me a job at a radio and
television factory, and he's now a member of the proletariat.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
So you're saying that this is sort of a common
archetype that the KGB was used to. At the same time,
he is an oddity on the eyes of an average American.
And I know that while he was in Min's tea,
gave interviews to journalists in the States that were doing
stories about him. So just how common was it, like,
were there was there even if it was small and
expat quote unquote community there or was it literally just
(15:59):
one person here and there that had been placed by
the KGB as a sort of oddity.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
Yeah, So that's a good question because it was very
common in the immediate wake of the revolution for the intellectuals,
the kind of celebrity thinkers and writers and artists to
go to the Soviet Union. People like Bertrand Russell would
go there and write glowingly about the new chapter in
history that was being written, the erection of Homo Sovieticus,
and all this these grand philosophizing about the great accomplishment
(16:29):
that was the Soviet Union, that begins to taper off
in the thirties, when the true nature of Stalinism, which
should have been readily apparent, becomes unavoidably apparent. And then
of course there's the famines in Ukraine and mass death.
There's the Great Terror in nineteen thirty seven nineteen thirty eight.
So by the time we get to the war, the
(16:49):
Soviet Union has lost much of its luster among left
wing intelligensia, not so much because they'd given up on
radical leftism or even Stalinism for that matter, but because
we sort of politically unfeasible. You couldn't really be viewed
as being aligned with Joseph Stalin, even if you quietly
thought that he was doing the right thing. And so
(17:10):
then there's the war, and then there's this shift away
toward looking for other causes movements to support. There's the
promise of malice China, and then of course right around
the time I should say that Oswald goes to Soviet Union,
there's the emergence of Castro and the promise of Cuba,
which of course Oswald, after he goes back to the
United States, will become involved in. But the point is
(17:33):
that by the time Oswald got there, not only was
he a cliche in the sense that the KGB was
familiar with this type, but he was a cliche whose
time had passed. So there's something doubly pathetic about the
whole thing. Yes, a lot of people used to do
what you were doing, and no one's doing it anymore
because they all know that this is a joke, and
(17:53):
even the sovietsknew that.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
By the time he was there, I think there were only.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
A handful of American expats were living in the Soviet Union.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
I think it might have been no more.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
Than ten or fifteen, I think at the most.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
Scattered across the whole country. So while he was in
the Soviet Union, he in fact got married with a
woman there, Marina Persokova. They started a family together. The
relationship was, from what I understand, fraud. There was a
lot of yelling. He had anger issues. I think, you know,
he's this perpetual outsider. So I imagine there's also just
(18:27):
a daily frustration with not having community and not being
understood and trying to square his politics with his personal
life and whatever else. And from what I understand, his
life starts to devolve a bit in the Soviet Union,
and that coincides with him becoming disillusioned with the politics
that he thought he was moving there to embrace.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
Yeah, I think that's right. Look, there's a pattern here.
The Soviet Union, like the Marines, had a certain rhythm
and a set of expectations and an unspoken code of
condat to many ways, is harder than the Marines because
the rules were probably less transparent. You just had to
kind of learn them. That was the role of social
cues and just being attuned and empathetic and all that.
(19:10):
And as always, Oswald has this impossible time adapting. So
it's always that he's fascinated by the novelty of at
all and he loves that he's the new person in there,
excited about him, And in the beginning he has a
hard time in his diary containing his excitement about all
the girls want to talk to him. He had not
had much in the way of personal life ever, or
(19:32):
an romantic life, and so this was all just already
new and exciting to him. But then over time, as
with the Marines, now you're here, you have a job,
you have an apartment, you develop personal commitments and obligations,
and you have to do certain things and you have
to be on time and do a good job and
all those things. And he has an impossible time with that.
(19:55):
And so I think with Rina, like the really fascinating
thing is that she, and generally speaking, like the Soviet
Union offered him, much like the Marines did, a very
good alternative life. Had he stuck with the Marines, he
would have had a possibly very very meaningful, constructive life.
Had he stuck with the Soviet Union, had he actually
been able to carry through on his imaginings, he would
(20:19):
have had a very comfortable life. He would have had
this apartment, which by Soviet standards is very nice. He
would have had a pension, he would have had decent healthcare,
again by their standards, not by ours. He would have
had a datcha. Probably, he would have had a network
in friends. It would have actually been a not that
bad way to go if you're somebody who's a very
very mediocre intelligence with very few prospects back in the
(20:42):
United States. It's not a bad thought, like, Okay, you're
not going to do much with your life, probably in America,
so why not be a technician at this factory in
Minsk where you're going to be taken care of, and
you'll have this community and a nice wife and he
ultimately has two daughters. That would have been a very
nice way for him to have gone about living. And
(21:02):
he probably would have made it to about the nineteen
nineties and that would have been it. But again, he
can't see things to their natural end or their fruition,
and so yes, at a certain point he just feels
this again, it's the same uncontainable sort of need to
get out. And as you probably know, he goes back
to the US embassy. He had gone there initially when
he came to Moscow, and he had very proudly and
defiantly thrown down his passport and said, you know, I'm
(21:25):
done with this, and he told the Americans and you
can throw this out, and the consular officer wisely kept
his passport and said to himself, what for. The KGB
also knew, which is that you're not going to make
it here as long as you think, and the kind
of person who is driven to come here in the
first place is the kind of person who's going to
(21:46):
have an impossible time doing what I just mapped out,
like actually building a life here. Eventually he sheepishly goes
back to the embassy in Moscow. He's able to engineer
a return home to the United States. Then he starts
making these kind of crazy requests that he asked the
Navy to change his honorable discharge to a just discharge.
(22:06):
The Navy, of course includes the Marines, so he was
overseen by the Navy. They had made his honorable discharge
discharge when they found out that he defected to the
Soviet Union, and now he's requesting it they change it
back to honorable discharge, which the Navy not unreasonably or
surprisingly says no to. But ultimately he's able to go
back to America.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
It seems also to your earlier point about how he's
not ever quite fitting in, he's specifically drawn to these
collectivist communities, whether it's the Marines or the Soviet I mean,
I realized those are, you know, in many ways opposite,
but these communities where the whole you know, your self
determination depends on being part of the collective rather than
(22:46):
living in a sort of more individualistic environment. And so
that really clashes with his more renegade instincts because he
wants to always be breaking the rules in some way,
and specifically in environments like this, that's the one thing
you can't do. You have to buy by the rules. Okay.
So he goes back to America, and Marina, from what
I understand, really did not want to move back to America.
(23:08):
So finally he convinces her they moved to America. And
where do they initially land.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
They initially go to New York, but then they find
their way to Dallas, where he's from. And it turns
out that there's actually a rather sizable Russian xpac community
in Dallas. These are not Soviet emigres. These are people
who come from the Russian emmigrat world, and so they
are for the most part, very anti Soviet, anti Marxists.
But he kind of insinuates himself into that community and
(23:35):
they take in both of them, especially Marina because she
can speak Russian, she's one of them. And he quickly
finds himself on the periphery and in a way, this
is the hardest chapter of his life. The advantage of
the previous chapters, the Marines and the Soviet Union, is
that they were very regimented and very clear, you know,
(23:55):
sort of expectations about what he had to do to
get by from one day to the next. Now he
really has to rebuild a life all by himself, and
he has to concoct out of nothing a future. And
as you said, he kind of took to these large
collectivists enterprises. He talked about being drawn to collectivism. I
don't actually think that was it. I think it was
(24:16):
more the maleness, the manliness of both these enterprises. It
was the thing that's missing right always in his life,
which is a man, the father figure. And it's sad,
right because he's so obviously looking for structure and that
kind of brick wall who's meant to hem in all
of your kind of worse impulses, all the things that
kind of lead young men astray. He's always looking for
that kind of structure and he wants it, but he
(24:38):
doesn't how to live in that world. So this thing
that he craves is this one thing that he can't
actually he doesn't how to make sense of it or
coexist with it. And so he comes back to the
United States, to Texas, and he's really lost, and that's
clear almost from the beginning, and that's how he falls
into Cuba activism stuff, the castro stuff, and it's what
(25:00):
leads to this very kind of frenetic bouncing around. There's
essentially no stability or happiness at home like that. They
just there's nothing about their life there that sounds all
that happy or meaningful. It doesn't feel very constructive, as
if there's much of a future in.
Speaker 1 (25:19):
Mind, right. And this is also from what I understand.
When his introduction of political violence happens, the possibility of
violence more clearly becomes a parent. So, for those who
might not know, JFK was not the first assassination attempt
while he was in Dallas, I believe he planned to
and failed to assassinate a different American politician, which is
(25:42):
General Edwin Walker, who was a rising right wing figure
around that time. Can you tell us just a little
bit about him and what kind of prompted the obsession.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
Yeah, well, you know, it's unclear exactly what prompted the
obsession because he doesn't talk about this much. He wrote
a few things here and there, but you're working with
very little, and certainly with Oswald, there's not much in
the way, there's almost zero introspection. So in all the
things he writes down, his kind of ramblings, he does
(26:12):
what very average people without any kind of insight into
themselves tend to do, which is he tends to abstract
and talks about these kind of grand processes and America
and the Soviet Union and Marxism and militarism, but without
really understanding at all what's driving him, why he is
(26:33):
so compelled by these various angers, these furies that shouldn't
really animate him that much, without thinking about the practical
or concrete implications of what he's thinking about or doing.
But there's a kind of impracticality and this sort of
hyperventilating and this proto activism that doesn't really have much
(26:54):
in the way of shape or definition with regard to
the general He tries to kill him, he fails, escapes,
They don't really come close to finding him. It's not
clear who's responsible. At least he's not implicated as far
as I know. And that comes shortly before the Kennedy assassination.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
Right, and there would seem to be a contradiction there
because this General Walker was staunchly anti Kennedy and was
the sort of like right wing anti communist figure. So
if anything, it would make more sense for that to
be a huge villain for Oswald.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
I was opposed like the Democrat Kennedy.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
Yes, I mean, obviously it's more complicated than that. But
it seems like this guy is a more natural enemy,
I guess, is what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (27:36):
I think that's a distinction that would have been lost
on Oswald, right. I think he probably viewed the General
much the way he viewed the president. Look, these are
all part of the American imperial power structure. It doesn't
really matter like some party designation.
Speaker 1 (27:49):
It doesn't. They're all war criminals, they're all villains.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
They're all you know, kind of this kind of monochromatic
brushstroke approach to American political life.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
We'll be back with more United States of Kennedy after
this break, and we're back with United States of Kennedy.
And to your point about the lack of introspection, from
(28:20):
what I understand his diary, which he called the Historic Diary,
is that right, there's a sense of remove he thinks
of himself as like a big thinker that is able
to think in broad strokes about large power structures without
necessarily placing himself within them. And maybe I'm wrong, but
does it come from a personal stake of I am
(28:41):
part of the proletariat and I am fighting against I
think that's a bit more like he's a political commentator
commenting at a remove or something.
Speaker 2 (28:49):
It's more that there's no really kind way to put this.
It's stupid, it's ignorant. It's utterly devoid of any kind
of intellectual depth, for sure, But just as important, there's
no insight into himself. There's no awareness of you know,
why do these things make me feel the way they do?
(29:09):
It's a good question, right, like why do certain political
opinions or ideas, words, statements, books, whatever evokes such strong
feelings in me? And how do I respond to those feelings?
How do I act on them? What's the best way
to do that? If you like something, you might talk
about these things. You might share these ideas. If you
don't like them, conversely, you might say why you don't
(29:30):
like them. But of course it's meant to be civilized,
and there's meant to be a discourse and a conversation,
and he's incapable of all that. And really there is
with Oswald like a very is a very very limited
vernacular when it comes to just you know, being able
to communicate any kind of ideas or anything like that.
And so yes, there's this sort of silly abstraction that
(29:52):
takes place constantly with him. I think that that's like
what you're talking about, Like the Historic Diary is just
this sort of like, yes, I'm commenting on not just
the world but history with the capital H in these
grand Hegelian terms and kind of framings. And that's risable, yeah,
which is another part of the male sort of energy
of this whole thing. It's very like you know guy
(30:14):
in college that loves reading political biographies of great men
or something.
Speaker 1 (30:18):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
It's every disaffected eighteen year old who's been exposed to
Nietzsche for a week, he's had a lecture or two,
or read a fragment of Thus spoke Gar Sustra, and
it's decided now that he's going to emulate the Nietzschean
style or he's going to start writing in these kind
(30:39):
of big german either idealistic or philosophical terms, it's laughable.
These philosophers had enormous quantities of education behind them. It
might be dead wrong about all kinds of things, but
they didn't actually just write from a position of ignorance.
And what Oswald does, which is much like I think
the disaffected eighteen year old who hopefully kind of grows
(31:00):
out of this after his second or third week in class,
what he does is he just emulates. And there's lots
of sort of grandiosity and silliness that I think became
clear after the assassination when they reviewed all of his
writings and ramblings were not the work of a serious man.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
It's also he is obviously isolated and not in a
college environment where he can bounce ideas off of people
and be in a discussion based as himinar where he's
saying something but then being questioned either by a professor
based I mean. It is a classic lone wolf type thing.
So after the botched assassination attempt, his life with Marina
(31:40):
is not going well. He's sort of at another low point.
They end up moving to New Orleans, and the missing
link with all his various alliances with Marxism and Communism
at the time is of course Cuba and Castro in Cuba,
and so when he goes to New Orleans, there's a
big Cuban community there. There is obviously a lot of
(32:03):
anger at Castro, but then there's an equal amount of
anger at JFK. This is right after Bay of Pigs.
There's a lot of political activity happening around anti Castro sentiment,
and this is, in classic Oswold fashion, an environment that
inspires him to get involved and create even more political agitation.
So what are his surroundings like and how does he
(32:26):
sort of fit into them? And I should say that
another reason why this is an especially interesting part of
the story is because so much of the conspiracy thinking
around the JFK sas Nation has to do with his
era living in New Orleans and with his various connections
to either, depending on who you ask, pro Castro or
anti Castro groups. I mean, we watch for this podcast,
(32:48):
we watch the Oliver Stone JFK film, The worst thing
ever made about this as an issue. I mean, it's
very tough because it's such a great movie just in turn,
like on a technical level, but it makes you feel
absolutely insane after you're done watching it. All of this
is to say apologist to Oliver Stone, But what actually
happened during the New Orleans years.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
I think what a lot of people do, this includes
Oliver Stone, is they lose themselves in the details and
they lose sight of the bigger picture and what's actually
happening here. They remind me a great deal of the
conspiracy theorist they used to run into with the National
Archives when I came back from the former Story Union,
I should say, and mins when I was researching Oswald's story,
and I came back and I was doing a lot
(33:27):
of archival research in the National Archives just outside DC,
and you go there and there are always these guys
who are kind of aging, usually aging boomers, and they
cut their glasses low, and they've got these like big
reams of books, and then they have the highlighters and
they're circling it every saca's still gas and say aha,
as if they've just unlocked the key to the deep state.
And there are all kinds of problems with their radiocination.
Speaker 1 (33:47):
You might say.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
The number one thing is they immerse themselves in the
mutia and they think that they're proving something, that they've
got the goods, and in so doing they lose sight
of what's actually happening. So why did he go to
New Orleans? Well, he knew Louisiana, he had spent half
his childhood in Louisiana. Why did he get involved in
(34:08):
the castro Cuba Because he had just come back from
the Soviet Union and it was adjacent to where he
had been. He was not recruited, he was not especially
successful in doing pro castro work in New Orleans. It
was just another cause to latch onto. It's something to
be a part of. He's always looking for things to
latch onto. My book is called the Interloper. He's trying
(34:29):
to break into spaces that he's not suited for, that
he doesn't know how to be a part of or
adapt to, and so this becomes his last effort. He
recognizes that, which is why he ultimately goes just shortly
before the assassination. Right, there's this last ditch effort. He
realizes on some level he's got to go back to
the Soviet Union. This is a huge mistake. So what
(34:50):
does he do. He goes to Mexico with the hope
that that's going to lead him to Cuba, with the
ultimate expectation that will lead him back to Moscow or
to the Soviet Union, and of course the Cubans the
Soviets are saying to themselves and to him, we're done
with you. And so he winds up being forced to
go back to the United States. And now it's like
you've seen in Star Wars where they're in the trash
(35:10):
compactor and the walls are kind of, you know, closing in,
and he's kind of bouncing back and forth, and the
oxygen is disappearing, and there's a desperation and you can
feel it mounting in sort of his movements and his
ramblings and his conversations, his interactions with Marina and other
people in the Russian XBAC community. And so the assassination
viewed through that lens is just this kind of explosive
(35:34):
sort of need to extricate himself from himself. I mean,
it's suicidal on some level. I don't know that he
thought through things.
Speaker 1 (35:42):
To that degree.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
I don't know that he actually expected that he would
be detained and then he would be shot by Jack
Ruby or some other very angry Kennedy supporter, But on
some level he must have understood that if you kill
an American president your life as you've known it is over.
And this is true if you kill anyone, but especially
if you kill an American president. And I think that's
(36:04):
what he wanted.
Speaker 3 (36:04):
It was an act of self destruction in some way. Absolutely,
And of course it has to have this homicidal rage
baited into it, because there is a lot of rage
directed at the whole world, because really, like the subject
of all this is why can I not fucking fit in?
Why is it that everywhere I go I fail? Everywhere
I go? I am an outsider. I'm always an introloper.
I'm always the guy who's breaking in. I'm never the
(36:27):
person who just joins, adapts and becomes. And the realization
I think that's percolating, that that's building up in his
head over these many years, is because you don't have
the equipment, that sort of psychic infrastructure to do this.
You don't know how to do this. So the assassination
is really this sort of homicidal, suicidal explosion that amounts
(36:48):
to a great escape from a very very unhappy life.
Speaker 1 (36:52):
We'll be back with more United States of Kennedy after
this break, and we're back with United States of Kennedy.
I mean, it's interesting you say that there's a lamenting
(37:14):
of not fitting in, because in fact his behavior is
not of someone who is trying to fit in. I mean,
just looking at his time in New Orleans, as I said,
there was a lot of anti Castro sentiment and organizing whatever,
and his response to that is going out and passing
around pro Castro flyers, one of the most fringe things
you could be doing at that time.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
I think that by that point he was spiraling rapidly.
But if you go back to Osbald's time in Minsk,
there's a for him, a rather long period in there,
about a year where he really begins to immerse himself
in the very best that Mince has to offer for
(37:54):
someone of his education and background. And I spent a
lot of time when I was researching book, and he
figures in the book with his close friend Ernst the Tobitz,
who almost certainly was informing on him was probably, I'm
guessing I couldn't pinpoint this, but I'm pretty sure it
was a kgb asset who was, you know, strategically planted
to collect information. They were all collecting information on him,
but I think the Tobotz was one of their most
(38:16):
valuable assets, possibly Marina as well, but he wanted to.
It's clear from his interactions, from the parties he attended
and the dinners he attended, and the life he found
himself in, there's this clear desire to be a part
of this world. That's why I focus on the Soviet
period because I think it's where he'd really tried and
(38:37):
really came closest to transcending himself, to adapting and to
building something. But he fails, and that failure I think
is truly devastating to Oswald. He doesn't recognize it, he
doesn't have the capacity to see what that means. But
it's a profound failure because what it really means is
that you're always going to be an interloper, You're always
(38:58):
going to be a failure, like a deeply failed man.
And I think that's how I would view then the
chapter in New Orleans, which by that point just this
kind of desperate, very end of his life again, casting
about trying to find some l like grasping for something
to escape yourself.
Speaker 1 (39:16):
Yeah, I'm conscious of time, and I want to get
to the post assassination chapter of all of this, which
is what most people know about him. He assassinates JFK.
If you believe the official narrative, and if you're not,
Oliver ston't, then he is immediately killed as he's being
transferred to a different facility by Jack Ruby. I want
to at least spend a little time talking about the
(39:38):
various conspiracies surrounding him. To me, the two most repeated
themes are either some sort of collusion with the CIA
or some sort of collusion with organized crime. What was
the status of those two theories? I mean, what are
the big smoking guns that people saw that they became
fascinated with and led them down these rabbit holes. Well,
(40:00):
there are the things that people talk are a lot,
the grassy knoll and.
Speaker 2 (40:03):
The There's been lots of discussion about the physics of
the bullet, especially the second bullet, and the bruit tape.
And the thing is that there are I think I forget.
I think it's six or seven million documents in the
Kenning assassination archive. You can extract from the archive any
theory you want. You can piece together any caatenation of
(40:25):
data points to construct whatever evil plot, whatever story you
want to imagine. I think that, as always, the question
is why do people feel compelled to do so.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
Why do they feel.
Speaker 2 (40:38):
As if they have to find the reason behind the
reason when it's so obvious that it is Oswald. Yes,
there were confusions about the shooting. There are always confusions.
There were sloppinesses or mistakes made by the Warren Commission.
There always are, and I think in the case of
the Warren Commission, they made some serious mistakes, but we
(40:59):
ignore Auckham's. The simplest explanation is the likeliest, and there's very,
very little reason to think that Oswald is not simply
the lone gunman who killed JFK. And what I find
more troubling is that so many Americans, and of course
this has become more of a problem in recent years,
feel compelled to believe that he could not have acted alone,
(41:23):
or that it was not him, or that this is
all just part of a big grouse, and that we're
all being duped, we're all being manipulated by secret clandestine powers.
These are all just unverifiable statements that no one can disprove,
but no one can prove.
Speaker 1 (41:41):
So I was watching the PBS Frontline from many years
ago about Lee Harvey Oswald and one of the first
talking heads, and I wish I remembered who it was.
Describes him as that famous Churchill quote, a mystery shrouded
and an enigma wrapped in a puzzle. And I think
your book goes a long ways into demystifying him. But
I'm wondering, are there still mysteries or unknown elements that
(42:04):
to this day you're like, God, I wish I had
that piece of the puzzle. No.
Speaker 2 (42:07):
I mean, look, it would be great if there were
any kind of record of his thoughts about American politics,
to say nothing of John F. Kennedy or White House policy.
But that's a whole level of sophistication that was completely
missing from his.
Speaker 1 (42:25):
His So there isn't I mean, in terms of JFK.
Like just at the most basic level. He never expressed
an opinion about JFK. No.
Speaker 2 (42:34):
In fact, the little we have according to Tetovitz, he
said one or two things that were praiseworthy of Kennedy.
I think it probably viewed Kennedy as part of this
American imperial blob and party affiliation policy. This is all
silly stuff for people who tell themselves lies about the
American hedgemon. There's no ability to distinguish or make thoughtful
(42:58):
distinctions between what one person says or believes in another
and policy distinctions. It's just assumption about the inherent and obvious,
unmistakable evil of America. All right, Well, I really know
what to do with that, because you know, it's not
as if this hatred resides atop a deep understanding of
(43:19):
American history, of America's role in the world, none of that.
It's so obviously personal mission is so obviously meant to
compensate for all the many things missing in his life,
starting with a father and then immediately followed by a
reliable mother. And you know, the very sad fact of
the matter is nothing was ever going to make up
(43:40):
for that, nothing was going to be able to help
Oswald dig his way out of a whole. And so
I think you're left with this very sad, angry, rudderless
man who is consumed by these imaginings and rages and
furies that are profoundly ill informed or ignorant, but are
(44:01):
meant to compensate for or make up for the gargantuan
whole in his soul.
Speaker 1 (44:07):
All right, So maybe maybe less Marx and more Freud
would have benefited him at Yeah, just like a few novels. Yeah, Peter,
thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you.
So that's it for this week's episode. United States of
Kennedy is hosted by me George Severes. Original music by
Joshua Topolski. Production help by Carmen lorenz Our. Executive producer
(44:28):
is Jenna Cagel, Research by Dave Rus and Austin Thompson,
edited by Graham Gibson, and mixed by Doug Bain. United
States of Kennedy is a production of iHeart Podcasts. Subscribe
and follow United States of Kennedy for all Things Kennedy
each week.
I'm George Severis and this is United States of Kennedy,
a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty.
Every week we go into one aspect of the Kennedy story,
and today we are talking about Lee Harvey Oswald. Sixty
years after the jfk assassination, the man arrested for killing him,
remains one of the most enigmatic figures of the twentieth
(00:28):
century and a lightning rod for conspiracy theorists everywhere. The
Warring Commission, the committee assembled to investigate the jfk assassination,
described Oswald as quote profoundly alienated from the world in
which he lived. Oswald had a tumultuous childhood. His father
died two months before he was born, and his mother
placed him in an orphanage when he was just three
(00:49):
years old. He attended twelve different schools as a child,
eventually joining the Marines when he was seventeen. Paradoxically, around
this time, he also developed an interest in communism and
the writings of Karl Marx. He eventually moved to the
Soviet Union, finding himself in the unusual position of being
an American expat living in Minsk during the height of
(01:10):
the Cold War. After moving back to the United States,
spending time in Dallas and the New Orleans, he became
even more isolated and his complicated and contradictory political beliefs
turned violent. At the mere age of twenty four, he
was arrested for killing JFK. Just two days later, as
he was being transferred from the city jail to the
county jail, a man named Jack Ruby shot him in
(01:32):
the stomach on live TV. Oswald died in the ambulance
on the way to Parkland Memorial Hospital, the same hospital
where JFK was pronounced dead two days earlier. Today, to
unpack Oswald's life and legacy, we are joined by Peter Savatnik,
senior editor at The Free Press and author of the
book The Interloper Lee Harvey Oswald Inside of the Soviet Union. Peter,
(01:54):
thank you for joining us. Great to be here. So
I want to get into Lee's early childhood and how
he got to be this kind of infamous figure. So
before we get into the specifics, tell me a little
bit about Lee Harvey Oswald's childhood.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
It's a childhood that's characterized by constant instability movement. So
all the core constituents that go into a happy, healthy
childhood were mostly, if not entirely absent. A reliable mother,
reliable father, a single place where you might live, a
(02:31):
single school or maybe one or two or three schools
over the many years that you attend, a community friends,
all the things that make up a normal upbringing and
that provide kids with a sense of place in the world.
That's all absent in his case. And so there's this
bouncing around from Texas to Louisiana. They go up to
(02:54):
New York for a little while, they come back, and
there is this rhythm that emerge. Every year and a half,
there's like a major rupture, and everything's uprooted. This is
all because of his mother, I should add Marguerite, who
is not well, and it usually it's because of some
kind of romantic trouble or work trouble, and they're always
(03:17):
scrambling for money, and so everything is uprooted, and they
go and then they settle down, and this time he's
told everything's gonna be better, and it's gonna be calm
and good, and of course that never happens because his
mother is the same person always, the only person in
his life who provides some semblance of normal sior stability.
(03:37):
Is his older brother, but he's a good bit older
and he's really on his own, and so it's a lonely, sad,
parapatetic kind of lifestyle that unlikely to lead anything good
or productive.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
And his father passes away a few months before he's born, right, right,
and then his mom ends up sending both his older
brothers to an orphanage and then eventually him, But he's
also in and out. I was unclear as to whether
he was living full time at the orphanage or he
was also living with his mother.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
I think it's sort of a little bit ill defined
for a bit. You know, you have the one through
line in his life is people organizations kind of filling
in the gaps when his mother simply couldn't pull together.
That the orphanage plays that role. But I think it's
the same pattern always, which is the normal things that
we expect a mother or a father to do can't
(04:33):
be expected to be provided for. And so here is
this constant casting about, the scrambling, and this looking and
wondering about where am I, Who am I? Where do
I go next? And there's a kind of fear and
a kind of an angstiness about Oswald that you can
sense is developing by the time he's in his early teens.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
Right, And so speaking of that, he's in his teens
in New York and he's of ostracize at school. Everyone
sees him as kind of odd. This is around when
he's starting to get interested in politics, and Marxist politics specifically.
So what is that like as a teen? How does
he get politicized?
Speaker 2 (05:12):
You know, it is a little bit tricky to answer,
because Oswald attempted to impose some kind of order on
his own thinking his own evolution later when he was
in the Soviet Union and then actually.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
After he left it.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
So he's viewing himself through the prism of the previous
five to ten years, and he's doing so with a
very very limited understanding of the ideas politics, geopolitics that
he's immersed in, and with a very very limited understanding
of himself. So the way he tells it is, he
(05:49):
leaves high school, he joins the Marines early, and he's
initially very excited about being a part of the Marines.
That he's not so surprising that the father fee that
is the military, imposing order on his life but it
turns out that that's hard too, because there are expectations
baked into that agreement, to that obligation. You have to
(06:11):
get up at a certain time, you have to adhere
to a certain code of conduct, you have to respect
your superior officers. All the things that go into making
a large organization like the Marines work with the punctilious
nature of any serious military organization. So it's very exacting,
and he just doesn't have the wherewithal, the determination, the
(06:32):
clarity of purpose to see it through. I think had
he been smarter, had he had somebody in his life
who had said to him, look, just get through this
chapter in your life, complete this one thing, and it
will give you an enormous sense of confidence. It will
be a boost that will set you on a different
course that might have led to a different outcome. But
there was no one like that in his life. And
(06:53):
so the same pattern ithres while he's in Japan, based
with the Marines overseas that he started to get into
a lot of trouble, and then inevitably he finds other outlets.
The way he describes is he comes into contact with
ideas emanating from the Soviet and communist worlds, and he's
fascinated by that, and in a way, they offer the
(07:16):
same thing that the Marines offered. It was this very
deadly serious mission.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
It was very kind of manly.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
It was tough, it was strong, but it was just new,
and it was something he hadn't yet messed up, and
so he could begin to fantasize about going to the
Soviet Union and recreating himself there in the way that
he had hoped to have recreated himself in the Marines.
And that's of course what he ultimately attempts to do.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
One of the very obvious contradictions here with his ideology,
which I'm sure is due to the fact that he
is largely self educated and also just incredibly young. I mean,
he's seventeen when he joins the Marines, is this contradiction
between his espoused communist slash Marxist views and his desire
to be in the Marines, which you would think are
(08:06):
to opposite instincts, and he doesn't necessarily abandon one for
the other. In fact, when he's in the Marines, he
famously is reading Marx and talking to those around him
about Marxist philosophy and communism. So how did his superiors
even allow that to continue as long as it did,
and how does he reconcile those beliefs in his own head.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Among people in his immediate orbit, there was an awareness
that Oswald was into Communism, and they would poke fun
at him. There was some name calling, but he was
a grunt. Ultimately, you're free to read what you want
to read, you can say what you want to say,
as long as you play by the rules. You know, Okay,
(08:52):
you're entitled to believe crazy ideas. That was I think
the attitude that the Marines had. The problem is that
as he became more serious about his Marxism, and again
it's important to understand, as you know, he is self educated,
and I think that's a very generous way of putting it.
You know, he had these very kind of fragmented, distorted,
stereotypical kind of notions or cartoonish ideas about the Soviet
(09:14):
Union and communism. His understanding of history is very, very porous.
So all this winds up getting kind of retrofitted into
you know, this picture, this scenario that he's painting for himself,
and he's imagining himself in and going to and joining
and being a part of and so I think as
his gels in his head, and he becomes more serious
(09:34):
about it, and he begins to think about how this actually
might unfold concretely. Then it becomes harder and harder for
him to be a good marine, and ultimately he applies
to get discharged early, just like he left to join
the Marines early, and he's allowed to do so, not
by a lot, but it's sort of symbolic in a way.
He's so eager to leave, he's so eager to jumped
(09:56):
to his next phase, to escape to that that he
has to get out of wherever he is before he's
actually supposed to get out.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
We're going to take a short break, stay with us,
and we're back with United States of Kennedy. There seems
to be this pattern that he's always laser focused on
(10:27):
a specific goal, and that interest lasts for maybe one
to two years, and then he sort of moves on
to the next thing. And I think that can be
a political commitment, it can be an obsession with one
specific figure. It can be an obsession with one specific
location that he wants to move to because he feels
like there would be a better life there. And again
something I kept going back to as I was reading
(10:47):
about him, is just like the jfk assassination happened when
he was only twenty four. All of this is as
he's basically, you know, what we would think of as
college age, which is when people think of him as
this mastermind or radicalized. But you know, it's important to
keep that in mind. But he's like eighteen, nineteen, twenty
years old. So he leaves the Marines, and then, of course,
(11:07):
and this is what your book is about, is his
time in the Soviet Union, which happens right after he
leaves the Marine. So obviously, for an American to manage
being an expat over there at the time, in the
peak of the Cold War was an incredibly strange thing.
So what was the process like by which he went
from being an ex marine in the US to going
(11:29):
to Moscow?
Speaker 2 (11:32):
So you're absolutely right, it was very strange. What Oswald
didn't appreciate is that the Soviets had seen this before
many times. They'd been seeing it for decades, and he
was by then a cliche that the disaffected, alienated young
American who is sort of ideologically excited, feverish and is
(11:55):
lost at home is a failure at home and thinks
that in the Soviet Union he will recreate himself, he
will become the man he's supposed to be. And so
by the time he gets there, recall that it's the
late fifties, Joseph Stalin has been dead at this point
for six years. Nikity Koushov is the leader. They're unsurprised
(12:18):
by Oswald. The only question that the KGB had for
him or about him was is he useful to us
at all? Does he know anything? And Oswald seems to
sense this or know this, and he makes a big
point when he's interviewed by the KGB that he was
at this base in Japan where there were the U
two spy planes. And as you may know, the U
two spy planes at the time were this top secret
(12:41):
program that the Eisenhower administration had been running capturing very
sensitive information in the Soviet Union. We had denied that
we were doing it, Soviets knew that we were doing it,
but publicly weed that we were doing it. The problem
from the Soviet vantage point was that they didn't have
any missiles that were powerful enough to reach the spy planes.
So he had all these these syplanes that were flying
(13:01):
in a very very high altitude of very powerful cameras,
and the Soviets couldn't take them out. And so the
question that the KGB had it was very simple, was
did Oswald know anything that would have helped them in
any way build a missile or take down these spy planes?
And it quickly became abundantly clear to them that he
(13:22):
knew nothing. They knew more about the spy planes than
he did. And so he's there for a grand total
of six days.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
When they tell him you're going to have to go.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
They don't want him there because he's a liability, he's unstable,
and they've seen this before. They know that he's not
going to be useful to them, and he's just going
to be a high visibility kind of problem. An American
ex marine in Moscow is a problem. And so what
does Otispal do? Not Surprisingly, he goes back to his hotel.
He attempts to kill himself, but he does a very
(13:53):
half hearted job and he sort of slits his wrists.
He winds up at his hospital.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
I've been there.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
It's just north of the center of Moscow. He's treated
and the Russians are kind of not sure what to do,
because he's attempted to kill himself, but in an attempt
that hard, and so the KGB when they find him,
he's been bleeding seriously, but he's not actually on the
precipice of death. He's just he needs to be seen
(14:22):
by a doctor and patched up. But he's you know,
more predictable ways of killing oneself, and Oswald didn't avail
himself with those ways. So anyway, he's treated and then
he's told, okay, fine, you want to stay, you can stay.
And then they do what they've done many times before
with disaffected Westerners who have come to the Soviet Union
hoping to recreate themselves. They send them to some boring,
(14:45):
out of the way provincial town and they say, okay,
you want the Soviet experience, We're going to give you
the Soviet experience. And they send him to Minsk, which
is the quintessential Soviet city in the sense that had
been utterly demolished during the war. During World War Two,
it was a disaster. I think more people were murdered
in Mints between the Nazis and the Soviets than possibly
(15:09):
in the other city in the Soviet Union. But it
was an utterly just destroyed place. And at the time,
remember we're only fourteen years removed from the end of
the war, so it's still in the midst of rebuilding,
very much so. And they send him there and he's
put up in this actually by Soviet standards, in a
very nice apartment.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
He has it to himself, which was very unusual.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
And he's given me a job at a radio and
television factory, and he's now a member of the proletariat.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
So you're saying that this is sort of a common
archetype that the KGB was used to. At the same time,
he is an oddity on the eyes of an average American.
And I know that while he was in Min's tea,
gave interviews to journalists in the States that were doing
stories about him. So just how common was it, like,
were there was there even if it was small and
expat quote unquote community there or was it literally just
(15:59):
one person here and there that had been placed by
the KGB as a sort of oddity.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
Yeah, So that's a good question because it was very
common in the immediate wake of the revolution for the intellectuals,
the kind of celebrity thinkers and writers and artists to
go to the Soviet Union. People like Bertrand Russell would
go there and write glowingly about the new chapter in
history that was being written, the erection of Homo Sovieticus,
and all this these grand philosophizing about the great accomplishment
(16:29):
that was the Soviet Union, that begins to taper off
in the thirties, when the true nature of Stalinism, which
should have been readily apparent, becomes unavoidably apparent. And then
of course there's the famines in Ukraine and mass death.
There's the Great Terror in nineteen thirty seven nineteen thirty eight.
So by the time we get to the war, the
(16:49):
Soviet Union has lost much of its luster among left
wing intelligensia, not so much because they'd given up on
radical leftism or even Stalinism for that matter, but because
we sort of politically unfeasible. You couldn't really be viewed
as being aligned with Joseph Stalin, even if you quietly
thought that he was doing the right thing. And so
(17:10):
then there's the war, and then there's this shift away
toward looking for other causes movements to support. There's the
promise of malice China, and then of course right around
the time I should say that Oswald goes to Soviet Union,
there's the emergence of Castro and the promise of Cuba,
which of course Oswald, after he goes back to the
United States, will become involved in. But the point is
(17:33):
that by the time Oswald got there, not only was
he a cliche in the sense that the KGB was
familiar with this type, but he was a cliche whose
time had passed. So there's something doubly pathetic about the
whole thing. Yes, a lot of people used to do
what you were doing, and no one's doing it anymore
because they all know that this is a joke, and
(17:53):
even the sovietsknew that.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
By the time he was there, I think there were only.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
A handful of American expats were living in the Soviet Union.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
I think it might have been no more.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
Than ten or fifteen, I think at the most.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
Scattered across the whole country. So while he was in
the Soviet Union, he in fact got married with a
woman there, Marina Persokova. They started a family together. The
relationship was, from what I understand, fraud. There was a
lot of yelling. He had anger issues. I think, you know,
he's this perpetual outsider. So I imagine there's also just
(18:27):
a daily frustration with not having community and not being
understood and trying to square his politics with his personal
life and whatever else. And from what I understand, his
life starts to devolve a bit in the Soviet Union,
and that coincides with him becoming disillusioned with the politics
that he thought he was moving there to embrace.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
Yeah, I think that's right. Look, there's a pattern here.
The Soviet Union, like the Marines, had a certain rhythm
and a set of expectations and an unspoken code of
condat to many ways, is harder than the Marines because
the rules were probably less transparent. You just had to
kind of learn them. That was the role of social
cues and just being attuned and empathetic and all that.
(19:10):
And as always, Oswald has this impossible time adapting. So
it's always that he's fascinated by the novelty of at
all and he loves that he's the new person in there,
excited about him, And in the beginning he has a
hard time in his diary containing his excitement about all
the girls want to talk to him. He had not
had much in the way of personal life ever, or
(19:32):
an romantic life, and so this was all just already
new and exciting to him. But then over time, as
with the Marines, now you're here, you have a job,
you have an apartment, you develop personal commitments and obligations,
and you have to do certain things and you have
to be on time and do a good job and
all those things. And he has an impossible time with that.
(19:55):
And so I think with Rina, like the really fascinating
thing is that she, and generally speaking, like the Soviet
Union offered him, much like the Marines did, a very
good alternative life. Had he stuck with the Marines, he
would have had a possibly very very meaningful, constructive life.
Had he stuck with the Soviet Union, had he actually
been able to carry through on his imaginings, he would
(20:19):
have had a very comfortable life. He would have had
this apartment, which by Soviet standards is very nice. He
would have had a pension, he would have had decent healthcare,
again by their standards, not by ours. He would have
had a datcha. Probably, he would have had a network
in friends. It would have actually been a not that
bad way to go if you're somebody who's a very
very mediocre intelligence with very few prospects back in the
(20:42):
United States. It's not a bad thought, like, Okay, you're
not going to do much with your life, probably in America,
so why not be a technician at this factory in
Minsk where you're going to be taken care of, and
you'll have this community and a nice wife and he
ultimately has two daughters. That would have been a very
nice way for him to have gone about living. And
(21:02):
he probably would have made it to about the nineteen
nineties and that would have been it. But again, he
can't see things to their natural end or their fruition,
and so yes, at a certain point he just feels
this again, it's the same uncontainable sort of need to
get out. And as you probably know, he goes back
to the US embassy. He had gone there initially when
he came to Moscow, and he had very proudly and
defiantly thrown down his passport and said, you know, I'm
(21:25):
done with this, and he told the Americans and you
can throw this out, and the consular officer wisely kept
his passport and said to himself, what for. The KGB
also knew, which is that you're not going to make
it here as long as you think, and the kind
of person who is driven to come here in the
first place is the kind of person who's going to
(21:46):
have an impossible time doing what I just mapped out,
like actually building a life here. Eventually he sheepishly goes
back to the embassy in Moscow. He's able to engineer
a return home to the United States. Then he starts
making these kind of crazy requests that he asked the
Navy to change his honorable discharge to a just discharge.
(22:06):
The Navy, of course includes the Marines, so he was
overseen by the Navy. They had made his honorable discharge
discharge when they found out that he defected to the
Soviet Union, and now he's requesting it they change it
back to honorable discharge, which the Navy not unreasonably or
surprisingly says no to. But ultimately he's able to go
back to America.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
It seems also to your earlier point about how he's
not ever quite fitting in, he's specifically drawn to these
collectivist communities, whether it's the Marines or the Soviet I mean,
I realized those are, you know, in many ways opposite,
but these communities where the whole you know, your self
determination depends on being part of the collective rather than
(22:46):
living in a sort of more individualistic environment. And so
that really clashes with his more renegade instincts because he
wants to always be breaking the rules in some way,
and specifically in environments like this, that's the one thing
you can't do. You have to buy by the rules. Okay.
So he goes back to America, and Marina, from what
I understand, really did not want to move back to America.
(23:08):
So finally he convinces her they moved to America. And
where do they initially land.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
They initially go to New York, but then they find
their way to Dallas, where he's from. And it turns
out that there's actually a rather sizable Russian xpac community
in Dallas. These are not Soviet emigres. These are people
who come from the Russian emmigrat world, and so they
are for the most part, very anti Soviet, anti Marxists.
But he kind of insinuates himself into that community and
(23:35):
they take in both of them, especially Marina because she
can speak Russian, she's one of them. And he quickly
finds himself on the periphery and in a way, this
is the hardest chapter of his life. The advantage of
the previous chapters, the Marines and the Soviet Union, is
that they were very regimented and very clear, you know,
(23:55):
sort of expectations about what he had to do to
get by from one day to the next. Now he
really has to rebuild a life all by himself, and
he has to concoct out of nothing a future. And
as you said, he kind of took to these large
collectivists enterprises. He talked about being drawn to collectivism. I
don't actually think that was it. I think it was
(24:16):
more the maleness, the manliness of both these enterprises. It
was the thing that's missing right always in his life,
which is a man, the father figure. And it's sad,
right because he's so obviously looking for structure and that
kind of brick wall who's meant to hem in all
of your kind of worse impulses, all the things that
kind of lead young men astray. He's always looking for
that kind of structure and he wants it, but he
(24:38):
doesn't how to live in that world. So this thing
that he craves is this one thing that he can't
actually he doesn't how to make sense of it or
coexist with it. And so he comes back to the
United States, to Texas, and he's really lost, and that's
clear almost from the beginning, and that's how he falls
into Cuba activism stuff, the castro stuff, and it's what
(25:00):
leads to this very kind of frenetic bouncing around. There's
essentially no stability or happiness at home like that. They
just there's nothing about their life there that sounds all
that happy or meaningful. It doesn't feel very constructive, as
if there's much of a future in.
Speaker 1 (25:19):
Mind, right. And this is also from what I understand.
When his introduction of political violence happens, the possibility of
violence more clearly becomes a parent. So, for those who
might not know, JFK was not the first assassination attempt
while he was in Dallas, I believe he planned to
and failed to assassinate a different American politician, which is
(25:42):
General Edwin Walker, who was a rising right wing figure
around that time. Can you tell us just a little
bit about him and what kind of prompted the obsession.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
Yeah, well, you know, it's unclear exactly what prompted the
obsession because he doesn't talk about this much. He wrote
a few things here and there, but you're working with
very little, and certainly with Oswald, there's not much in
the way, there's almost zero introspection. So in all the
things he writes down, his kind of ramblings, he does
(26:12):
what very average people without any kind of insight into
themselves tend to do, which is he tends to abstract
and talks about these kind of grand processes and America
and the Soviet Union and Marxism and militarism, but without
really understanding at all what's driving him, why he is
(26:33):
so compelled by these various angers, these furies that shouldn't
really animate him that much, without thinking about the practical
or concrete implications of what he's thinking about or doing.
But there's a kind of impracticality and this sort of
hyperventilating and this proto activism that doesn't really have much
(26:54):
in the way of shape or definition with regard to
the general He tries to kill him, he fails, escapes,
They don't really come close to finding him. It's not
clear who's responsible. At least he's not implicated as far
as I know. And that comes shortly before the Kennedy assassination.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
Right, and there would seem to be a contradiction there
because this General Walker was staunchly anti Kennedy and was
the sort of like right wing anti communist figure. So
if anything, it would make more sense for that to
be a huge villain for Oswald.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
I was opposed like the Democrat Kennedy.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
Yes, I mean, obviously it's more complicated than that. But
it seems like this guy is a more natural enemy,
I guess, is what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (27:36):
I think that's a distinction that would have been lost
on Oswald, right. I think he probably viewed the General
much the way he viewed the president. Look, these are
all part of the American imperial power structure. It doesn't
really matter like some party designation.
Speaker 1 (27:49):
It doesn't. They're all war criminals, they're all villains.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
They're all you know, kind of this kind of monochromatic
brushstroke approach to American political life.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
We'll be back with more United States of Kennedy after
this break, and we're back with United States of Kennedy.
And to your point about the lack of introspection, from
(28:20):
what I understand his diary, which he called the Historic Diary,
is that right, there's a sense of remove he thinks
of himself as like a big thinker that is able
to think in broad strokes about large power structures without
necessarily placing himself within them. And maybe I'm wrong, but
does it come from a personal stake of I am
(28:41):
part of the proletariat and I am fighting against I
think that's a bit more like he's a political commentator
commenting at a remove or something.
Speaker 2 (28:49):
It's more that there's no really kind way to put this.
It's stupid, it's ignorant. It's utterly devoid of any kind
of intellectual depth, for sure, But just as important, there's
no insight into himself. There's no awareness of you know,
why do these things make me feel the way they do?
(29:09):
It's a good question, right, like why do certain political
opinions or ideas, words, statements, books, whatever evokes such strong
feelings in me? And how do I respond to those feelings?
How do I act on them? What's the best way
to do that? If you like something, you might talk
about these things. You might share these ideas. If you
don't like them, conversely, you might say why you don't
(29:30):
like them. But of course it's meant to be civilized,
and there's meant to be a discourse and a conversation,
and he's incapable of all that. And really there is
with Oswald like a very is a very very limited
vernacular when it comes to just you know, being able
to communicate any kind of ideas or anything like that.
And so yes, there's this sort of silly abstraction that
(29:52):
takes place constantly with him. I think that that's like
what you're talking about, Like the Historic Diary is just
this sort of like, yes, I'm commenting on not just
the world but history with the capital H in these
grand Hegelian terms and kind of framings. And that's risable, yeah,
which is another part of the male sort of energy
of this whole thing. It's very like you know guy
(30:14):
in college that loves reading political biographies of great men
or something.
Speaker 1 (30:18):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
It's every disaffected eighteen year old who's been exposed to
Nietzsche for a week, he's had a lecture or two,
or read a fragment of Thus spoke Gar Sustra, and
it's decided now that he's going to emulate the Nietzschean
style or he's going to start writing in these kind
(30:39):
of big german either idealistic or philosophical terms, it's laughable.
These philosophers had enormous quantities of education behind them. It
might be dead wrong about all kinds of things, but
they didn't actually just write from a position of ignorance.
And what Oswald does, which is much like I think
the disaffected eighteen year old who hopefully kind of grows
(31:00):
out of this after his second or third week in class,
what he does is he just emulates. And there's lots
of sort of grandiosity and silliness that I think became
clear after the assassination when they reviewed all of his
writings and ramblings were not the work of a serious man.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
It's also he is obviously isolated and not in a
college environment where he can bounce ideas off of people
and be in a discussion based as himinar where he's
saying something but then being questioned either by a professor
based I mean. It is a classic lone wolf type thing.
So after the botched assassination attempt, his life with Marina
(31:40):
is not going well. He's sort of at another low point.
They end up moving to New Orleans, and the missing
link with all his various alliances with Marxism and Communism
at the time is of course Cuba and Castro in Cuba,
and so when he goes to New Orleans, there's a
big Cuban community there. There is obviously a lot of
(32:03):
anger at Castro, but then there's an equal amount of
anger at JFK. This is right after Bay of Pigs.
There's a lot of political activity happening around anti Castro sentiment,
and this is, in classic Oswold fashion, an environment that
inspires him to get involved and create even more political agitation.
So what are his surroundings like and how does he
(32:26):
sort of fit into them? And I should say that
another reason why this is an especially interesting part of
the story is because so much of the conspiracy thinking
around the JFK sas Nation has to do with his
era living in New Orleans and with his various connections
to either, depending on who you ask, pro Castro or
anti Castro groups. I mean, we watch for this podcast,
(32:48):
we watch the Oliver Stone JFK film, The worst thing
ever made about this as an issue. I mean, it's
very tough because it's such a great movie just in turn,
like on a technical level, but it makes you feel
absolutely insane after you're done watching it. All of this
is to say apologist to Oliver Stone, But what actually
happened during the New Orleans years.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
I think what a lot of people do, this includes
Oliver Stone, is they lose themselves in the details and
they lose sight of the bigger picture and what's actually
happening here. They remind me a great deal of the
conspiracy theorist they used to run into with the National
Archives when I came back from the former Story Union,
I should say, and mins when I was researching Oswald's story,
and I came back and I was doing a lot
(33:27):
of archival research in the National Archives just outside DC,
and you go there and there are always these guys
who are kind of aging, usually aging boomers, and they
cut their glasses low, and they've got these like big
reams of books, and then they have the highlighters and
they're circling it every saca's still gas and say aha,
as if they've just unlocked the key to the deep state.
And there are all kinds of problems with their radiocination.
Speaker 1 (33:47):
You might say.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
The number one thing is they immerse themselves in the
mutia and they think that they're proving something, that they've
got the goods, and in so doing they lose sight
of what's actually happening. So why did he go to
New Orleans? Well, he knew Louisiana, he had spent half
his childhood in Louisiana. Why did he get involved in
(34:08):
the castro Cuba Because he had just come back from
the Soviet Union and it was adjacent to where he
had been. He was not recruited, he was not especially
successful in doing pro castro work in New Orleans. It
was just another cause to latch onto. It's something to
be a part of. He's always looking for things to
latch onto. My book is called the Interloper. He's trying
(34:29):
to break into spaces that he's not suited for, that
he doesn't know how to be a part of or
adapt to, and so this becomes his last effort. He
recognizes that, which is why he ultimately goes just shortly
before the assassination. Right, there's this last ditch effort. He
realizes on some level he's got to go back to
the Soviet Union. This is a huge mistake. So what
(34:50):
does he do. He goes to Mexico with the hope
that that's going to lead him to Cuba, with the
ultimate expectation that will lead him back to Moscow or
to the Soviet Union, and of course the Cubans the
Soviets are saying to themselves and to him, we're done
with you. And so he winds up being forced to
go back to the United States. And now it's like
you've seen in Star Wars where they're in the trash
(35:10):
compactor and the walls are kind of, you know, closing in,
and he's kind of bouncing back and forth, and the
oxygen is disappearing, and there's a desperation and you can
feel it mounting in sort of his movements and his
ramblings and his conversations, his interactions with Marina and other
people in the Russian XBAC community. And so the assassination
viewed through that lens is just this kind of explosive
(35:34):
sort of need to extricate himself from himself. I mean,
it's suicidal on some level. I don't know that he
thought through things.
Speaker 1 (35:42):
To that degree.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
I don't know that he actually expected that he would
be detained and then he would be shot by Jack
Ruby or some other very angry Kennedy supporter, But on
some level he must have understood that if you kill
an American president your life as you've known it is over.
And this is true if you kill anyone, but especially
if you kill an American president. And I think that's
(36:04):
what he wanted.
Speaker 3 (36:04):
It was an act of self destruction in some way. Absolutely,
And of course it has to have this homicidal rage
baited into it, because there is a lot of rage
directed at the whole world, because really, like the subject
of all this is why can I not fucking fit in?
Why is it that everywhere I go I fail? Everywhere
I go? I am an outsider. I'm always an introloper.
I'm always the guy who's breaking in. I'm never the
(36:27):
person who just joins, adapts and becomes. And the realization
I think that's percolating, that that's building up in his
head over these many years, is because you don't have
the equipment, that sort of psychic infrastructure to do this.
You don't know how to do this. So the assassination
is really this sort of homicidal, suicidal explosion that amounts
(36:48):
to a great escape from a very very unhappy life.
Speaker 1 (36:52):
We'll be back with more United States of Kennedy after
this break, and we're back with United States of Kennedy.
I mean, it's interesting you say that there's a lamenting
(37:14):
of not fitting in, because in fact his behavior is
not of someone who is trying to fit in. I mean,
just looking at his time in New Orleans, as I said,
there was a lot of anti Castro sentiment and organizing whatever,
and his response to that is going out and passing
around pro Castro flyers, one of the most fringe things
you could be doing at that time.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
I think that by that point he was spiraling rapidly.
But if you go back to Osbald's time in Minsk,
there's a for him, a rather long period in there,
about a year where he really begins to immerse himself
in the very best that Mince has to offer for
(37:54):
someone of his education and background. And I spent a
lot of time when I was researching book, and he
figures in the book with his close friend Ernst the Tobitz,
who almost certainly was informing on him was probably, I'm
guessing I couldn't pinpoint this, but I'm pretty sure it
was a kgb asset who was, you know, strategically planted
to collect information. They were all collecting information on him,
but I think the Tobotz was one of their most
(38:16):
valuable assets, possibly Marina as well, but he wanted to.
It's clear from his interactions, from the parties he attended
and the dinners he attended, and the life he found
himself in, there's this clear desire to be a part
of this world. That's why I focus on the Soviet
period because I think it's where he'd really tried and
(38:37):
really came closest to transcending himself, to adapting and to
building something. But he fails, and that failure I think
is truly devastating to Oswald. He doesn't recognize it, he
doesn't have the capacity to see what that means. But
it's a profound failure because what it really means is
that you're always going to be an interloper, You're always
(38:58):
going to be a failure, like a deeply failed man.
And I think that's how I would view then the
chapter in New Orleans, which by that point just this
kind of desperate, very end of his life again, casting
about trying to find some l like grasping for something
to escape yourself.
Speaker 1 (39:16):
Yeah, I'm conscious of time, and I want to get
to the post assassination chapter of all of this, which
is what most people know about him. He assassinates JFK.
If you believe the official narrative, and if you're not,
Oliver ston't, then he is immediately killed as he's being
transferred to a different facility by Jack Ruby. I want
to at least spend a little time talking about the
(39:38):
various conspiracies surrounding him. To me, the two most repeated
themes are either some sort of collusion with the CIA
or some sort of collusion with organized crime. What was
the status of those two theories? I mean, what are
the big smoking guns that people saw that they became
fascinated with and led them down these rabbit holes. Well,
(40:00):
there are the things that people talk are a lot,
the grassy knoll and.
Speaker 2 (40:03):
The There's been lots of discussion about the physics of
the bullet, especially the second bullet, and the bruit tape.
And the thing is that there are I think I forget.
I think it's six or seven million documents in the
Kenning assassination archive. You can extract from the archive any
theory you want. You can piece together any caatenation of
(40:25):
data points to construct whatever evil plot, whatever story you
want to imagine. I think that, as always, the question
is why do people feel compelled to do so.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
Why do they feel.
Speaker 2 (40:38):
As if they have to find the reason behind the
reason when it's so obvious that it is Oswald. Yes,
there were confusions about the shooting. There are always confusions.
There were sloppinesses or mistakes made by the Warren Commission.
There always are, and I think in the case of
the Warren Commission, they made some serious mistakes, but we
(40:59):
ignore Auckham's. The simplest explanation is the likeliest, and there's very,
very little reason to think that Oswald is not simply
the lone gunman who killed JFK. And what I find
more troubling is that so many Americans, and of course
this has become more of a problem in recent years,
feel compelled to believe that he could not have acted alone,
(41:23):
or that it was not him, or that this is
all just part of a big grouse, and that we're
all being duped, we're all being manipulated by secret clandestine powers.
These are all just unverifiable statements that no one can disprove,
but no one can prove.
Speaker 1 (41:41):
So I was watching the PBS Frontline from many years
ago about Lee Harvey Oswald and one of the first
talking heads, and I wish I remembered who it was.
Describes him as that famous Churchill quote, a mystery shrouded
and an enigma wrapped in a puzzle. And I think
your book goes a long ways into demystifying him. But
I'm wondering, are there still mysteries or unknown elements that
(42:04):
to this day you're like, God, I wish I had
that piece of the puzzle. No.
Speaker 2 (42:07):
I mean, look, it would be great if there were
any kind of record of his thoughts about American politics,
to say nothing of John F. Kennedy or White House policy.
But that's a whole level of sophistication that was completely
missing from his.
Speaker 1 (42:25):
His So there isn't I mean, in terms of JFK.
Like just at the most basic level. He never expressed
an opinion about JFK. No.
Speaker 2 (42:34):
In fact, the little we have according to Tetovitz, he
said one or two things that were praiseworthy of Kennedy.
I think it probably viewed Kennedy as part of this
American imperial blob and party affiliation policy. This is all
silly stuff for people who tell themselves lies about the
American hedgemon. There's no ability to distinguish or make thoughtful
(42:58):
distinctions between what one person says or believes in another
and policy distinctions. It's just assumption about the inherent and obvious,
unmistakable evil of America. All right, Well, I really know
what to do with that, because you know, it's not
as if this hatred resides atop a deep understanding of
(43:19):
American history, of America's role in the world, none of that.
It's so obviously personal mission is so obviously meant to
compensate for all the many things missing in his life,
starting with a father and then immediately followed by a
reliable mother. And you know, the very sad fact of
the matter is nothing was ever going to make up
(43:40):
for that, nothing was going to be able to help
Oswald dig his way out of a whole. And so
I think you're left with this very sad, angry, rudderless
man who is consumed by these imaginings and rages and
furies that are profoundly ill informed or ignorant, but are
(44:01):
meant to compensate for or make up for the gargantuan
whole in his soul.
Speaker 1 (44:07):
All right, So maybe maybe less Marx and more Freud
would have benefited him at Yeah, just like a few novels. Yeah, Peter,
thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you.
So that's it for this week's episode. United States of
Kennedy is hosted by me George Severes. Original music by
Joshua Topolski. Production help by Carmen lorenz Our. Executive producer
(44:28):
is Jenna Cagel, Research by Dave Rus and Austin Thompson,
edited by Graham Gibson, and mixed by Doug Bain. United
States of Kennedy is a production of iHeart Podcasts. Subscribe
and follow United States of Kennedy for all Things Kennedy
each week.
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