Thank you for listening to The Rest is History. For bonus episodes, early access, add-free listening, and access to our chat community, sign up at restishistorypod. Com. That's restishistorypod. Com.

He kept the Marxist books in his room, took them to the library for renewal, carried them back home. The books themselves were secret, forbidden, and hard to read. They altered the room, charged it with meaning. The draveness of his surroundings, his own shabby clothes were explained and transformed by these books. He saw himself as part of something vast and sweeping. He was the product of a sweeping history. He and his mother locked into a process, a system of money and property that diminished their human worth every day, as if by scientific law. The books made part of something. Something led up to his presence in this room, in this particular skin, and something would follow. That, Dominic, is Don Delillo, great American novelist writing about Lee Harvey Oswold in his tremendous novel, Libra, which he published in 1988. It's actually a while since I read it. But as I recall the conspiracy theory in that it's an alliance with the CIA and.

Cuban exiles. That's right. They've created a plot because it's a book not just about the Kennedy assassination, but it's about plotting and narrative, isn't it?

It is, and it's about the unknowability, isn't it? Because essentially Don Delillo, who's a brilliantly sophisticated novelist and very aware of the porous borders between fiction and non-fiction, is essentially casting the Warren Commission as another work of fiction.

Yeah. So the assassination almost begins as a work of fiction that then comes true, doesn't it? The CIA create the conspiracy, they implot it, and then they cast Osward. It becomes true, and then the Warren Commission itself is a narrative.

So a little bit like Foucault's pendulum, Umberto Eikho's novel where a conspiracy theory is constructed, the conspiracy is.

Actually true. Exactly. And you can see why novelists have always been fascinated. James L. Roy, you mentioned in the last episode, Norman Maylor, have been fascinated by the Kennedys and the Kennedy assassination because if you're interested in narrative, in plotting, as you say, in the relationship between fact and fiction, this is a gift to you as a writer, isn't it?

Absolutely. But Don Delillo places Lee Harvey Oswold, despite all the the the the wrapping of conspiracy and so on, he places Lee Harvey Oswold at the center of the story, rather than the way that actually the Warren Commission does. I mean, the Warren Commission says Lee Harvey Oswold did it and he acted alone and there was no conspiracy and Lee Harvey Oswold did not know Jack Ruby. And Jack Ruby, likewise, was not part of a conspiracy. We've done six episodes. I want to know what you think. I'm guessing from pretty much everything that you said beforehand that you would agree with the Warren Commission, which is great news for the Warrant Commission as well.

It validates them. What a wonderful endorsement for them. I think the keys to this crime are in the personality of the victim and of the killer. We spent a lot of time talking about John F. Kennedy because I think understanding his personalities was so important to understanding why it's to me, inherently implausible that powerful government agencies would wish to murder him in broad daylight. Because I think understanding the essential small C conservatism of Kennedy, his involvement in the Second World War, his devotion to America, his devotion to America's role in the world, when you understand all that and you understand what President he was, I think that allows you to eliminate some of these suspects because it's obvious they would not have any meaningful motive. But now we come to the man who was seen walking away from the Texas Book Depository and was later involved in shooting the police from J. D. Tippet. I think if we understand Lee Harvey Oswold, Tom, we will understand this crime and we will have the answer to the mystery.

So you think that Captain Fritz, the man who interrogated him and who in a sense, I suppose, has a better understanding of what might have motivated him.

And.

Who says that he definitely did it.

You'd.

Agree with him that it is Lee Harvey Oswold.

I do, Tom. I do think Lee Harvey Oswold killed John F. Kennedy. I think when we go into his life and we discuss his movements, it will become clear why he is such a plausible suspect. Then when we list some of the evidence, you will see that no other explanation carries so much evidentiary weight. But let's start with Oswold himself. Oswold was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, September 1939. The outbreak of the Second World War in Europe. He is born to Robert Oswold and Margaret Clavery. It's his mother's second marriage. His father, Robert, died of a heart attack two months before he was born. He is born to a single mother. His mother is a very, very rackety person. She ends up moving to Dallas and he goes to school in Fort Worth. Initially, he is a shy, withdrawn, difficult boy, troubled boy. This is completely understandable because his mother has married for a third time a guy called Erwin Ectahl, and she has a very tempestuous relationship with this guy, Ectahl. She is a very troubled woman herself, Margaret. Lee, like so many children, so many towns across the world, he is affected by that.

The reports of him that we have at school when he's a little boy are that he is a sullong little boy. He's aggressive. He likes reading. I mean, the reading is we started with books, Tom, and I think the books are important. I think they're really important, actually. People tend to underestimate the importance of his Marxism and his politics.

So his mother, you said that she's a difficult woman, but one of the keys to her character, it seems, is that she feels that her life has not measured up to her expectation of what it should have been. And do you think that Lee Harvey Oswold has that same sense, a sense of his own talents and the fact that his circumstances are not adequate to those talents?

Undoubtably. Undoubtably, Tom. Already we have a couple of things that a lot of assassins have in common. So your John Hinklers, your Arthur Bremers, the people who have tried to shoot public figures in American history. It is very common that they will be boys who've had troubled childhoods, who have had very difficult relationships with their parents, who have been lonely, withdrawn, sullain, but who also have been dreamers. In the same way that somebody like Adolf Hitler was a dreamer. I mean, if you want to take a much more benevolence, we've mentioned this comparison many times between Hitler and Churchill. Churchill was also, of course, a dreamer. Boys tend to be dreamers. I mean, Churchill's life did measure up to his dreams. Hitler made his dreams a reality. Assassin are often boys who continue to have these dreams, but they are constantly disappointed. Fate and life is against them. The odds are against them from the start, and they react to that by being bitter and resentful. That's definitely the.

Case with Lee. In a sense, they become conspiracy theories because they come to feel that life, some malevolent force, whether it's supernatural or not, is acting.

Against them. Undoubt, Tom. Undoubtably. Lee moves to New York when he's 12 with his mother. She moving around, so it's a very unstable life they lead. Don Delillow's book that you quoted from the beginning, that begins with him in New York, riding the subway trains, overwhelmed by the light and the darkness and the sensory overload of being in New York in the 1950s. Lee goes to school in the Bronx. He plays truant from school. He is at this point identified as a very difficult and troubled boy. He's sent to a reformatory for psychiatric assessment. We have a report on him from a case worker at Columbia University. She says he's detached, she's withdrawn. She quite likes him. She says there's a rather pleasant appealing quality about this emotionally starved, affectionless youngster which grows as one speaks to him. It seems clear that he's detached himself from the world around him because no one in it ever met any of his needs for love. His mother is totally self-absorbed, crazy affairs and relationships, very difficult, and she doesn't take any interest in Lee. We also have the report of the psychiatrist from the reformatry of Dr.

Hartogs, a tense and withdrawn and evasive boy. He likes to give the impression he didn't care about others, difficult to penetrate the emotional wall behind which this boy hides, his feelings of awkwardness and insecurity. He diagnoses him as having personality pattern disturbance with skizoid features and passive aggressive tendencies. The reason I say all this is do you remember Captain Fritz's interrogation of Oswold and the reaction of all the Dallas PD who said they found Oswold oddly sometimes detached, robotic, like he wasn't really there. This is precisely the description that is given by these people when Lihar Vyazwood is in his mid-teens in New York. I mean, it's uncanny how similar they are. He still has problems at school in 1953. There's talk of him being put into a home away from his mother.

So she's that bad a parent.

That bad a parent. Exactly. Let's not underestimate how bad. This isn't just that he's from a poor family or a single-parent family or one in which his mother has a complicated love life. She's a sufficiently bad parent.

Well, because the weird thing that is often said about her when her son is in police custody, that she seems almost to be enjoying it. At last, she's a center of attention. At last, she's not a nobody.

Yes, exactly. You can see how if his mother thinks like that, that Lee himself, the fear of being a nobody, the sense that we all have come across people like this or heard of people like this, people who feel life has not treated them properly, and it is a conspiracy. The high ups, the rich, teachers, social workers, they're all in it.

He becomes a socialist very early on and then, in due course, a Marxist.

Yes.

I mean, I don't want to engage in cold psychology, but I'm going to engage in cold psychology.

We love it.

I was living in New York, the great engine room of capitalism, this great gidey gilded golden city full of wealth and power. Do you think the sense of being alienated from that is what is feeding into his... What ultimately comes to see him a hatred for capitalism, but more specifically for America itself?

Undoubtably. He definitely becomes a socialist or identifies himself as a socialist by 16, 17. He writes to the Socialist Party of America. We have a letter in which he says he's been studying socialist principles for whatever, 15 months. Lee is not an immensely bright boy. I mean, he is a reader and he's interested in ideas, but he's not Ludwig, Wittgenstein. He's an autodidact, and he stumbles across socialism and Marxism, and it gives him the answers.

And a dignity as well, right? Because if he's the alienated proletariat, then he's destined to inherit.

The world. Undoubtably. I mean, if it hadn't been Marxism, it might well have been something else, a religion of some kind, a militant version of some religion or some other political greed. If he'd been in Germany in the 1920s, it could have been could have been Nazism, that thing. I think the interesting thing about Marxism is that Marxism, like so many militant creeds, you could argue, is itself a conspiracy theory, right? That there are the good guys and the bad guys there are. There are, yeah. So that this will explain the workings.

And also that you have a duty to... Marx never puts it like this, but it's very evident in his writings. You have a moral duty to overthrow the evil.

I mean, that's why I think that reading that you began with the Delillow reading is so suggestive. The books that he reads gives him the sense that he is part of something meaningful, a sweeping history. He has his part to play. He has his dignity.

Right, because by dissolving his agency as an individual, it gives him a class agency.

Yes, exactly. But here's the interesting thing. He leaves school and he becomes a US Marine. Why a US Marine if you're a Marxist? Well, you can see why, can't you? It gives him a sense of belonging. It doesn't quite fit with his Marxism, but he will see the world. He goes to Mississippi, he's in California, he's in Japan, he's in the Philippines.

Dominic, in the Marines, is he trained.

To shoot? What are you asking? Because you know the answer to that. Of course he is. Now, it is so often said that Lee Harveyarswell could not have shot John F. Kennedy because he was not a good shot. This is just wrong. He was a good shot. In December 1956, he did a test and he scored 212. I don't actually know what this out of or what it means, but apparently this is a good enough score to qualify you as a sharp shooter. Three years later, he does, well, two and a half years later, May 1959, he does another test. He scores worse. He scores 191. That means he's no longer rated Sharp shooter. He's rated as marksman. But by that point, actually, he's already lost interest in the Marines and he's getting ready to leave. So some people say, Is he really trying anymore? Either way, he's a better shooter than Tom, Dick, and Harry on the street.

Yeah, the three hobos.

Right, three hobos.

Exactly.

He's a better shooter than Jack Ruby. I mean, Jack Ruby shot Oswold from a distance of about two inches. Oswold, he can do this. At this point, he's fixated weirdly on Russia. So we know that he used to read a Russian dictionary, that he would study Russian. And it sometimes said, Well, the CIA put him up to this. I mean, he was an unusual figure because they didn't normally get Marines to read Russian, so he must have been singled out as an agent. Actually, we know that his fellow Marines thought it was amusing.

Red Lee.

Yeah, they would say Red Lee. It made him a character. It's a bit like if you were a Royal Marine today, well, and you were reading Russian. The other Marines, they wouldn't say, My God, the man must be a traitor and an agent. They would probably think it was a funny quirk.

Like a joke. Something distinctive.

Something distinctive, a bit wacky. And that's how they think of Lee Harvey Oswold. He goes around saying, No, I'm a communist, I'm a Marxist. He's insubordinate sometimes to his superiors. We've talked so many times in the rest of his history about Ronald Reagan and his love for the Reader's Digest. Lee Harvey Oswold is reading similar periodicals but from a more extremain periodicals, but more extreme periodicals from a left-wing perspective, he'll read some nonsense about China and then he'll be asking his superiors about it. They don't know anything.

About it. Difficult questions about tractor production.

In Zhangji or whatever. Exactly. Then he'll smirk to himself that he knows more.

Than they do. That must have made him popular with his.

Commanding officers. Exactly. He's very unpopular because he doesn't shine his shoes, he gets up late. He wears his hat too low so that he doesn't have to look his officers in the eye. And he's generally- It's all very teenage behavior. How old is he at this point? Twenty. He's a very young man who is behaving as young men sometimes do. That summer, 1959, he asks if he can leave the Marines because he says his mother is ill, she isn't, and he's discharged. He has dreamed up this scheme of going to the Soviet Union. Just a mad thing to do, but a sign of what an eccentric.

Troubled-because this is the teeth of the Cold War. We've got the Berlin Walls being built and the human-missile crisis is hoving into view and he's off to.

The Soviet Union. But this is his chance to become a somebody, isn't it, Tom? To do something, have an adventure.

But just to say, this is really very odd. You can see why this has served to germinate all kinds of conspiracy theories. Because it is very, very unusual. But again, I suppose you could stand it on its head and say it's the fact that he's such an unusual person that explains why he ends up doing such an unusual.

And horrific crime. I think that's right, Tom. He gets a ship to France, then he travels via London and Switzerland to Helsinki, and then he takes a train to Moscow. And when he arrives in Moscow on 16th of October.

1959- Just to ask, you can just turn up, can you, if you're an American? Because it seems improbable. Do you need a visa? I mean, how.

Does it work? Well, this is the thing. He gets on the train and the train from Helsinki arrives. This is the age of Finlandisation. So Finland is in a weird gray area halfway between the west and the east. So it's appeasing both sides. So Finland is this gray zone and you can literally get on a train. And you.

Don't need a.

Visa at all. Well, if you haven't got a visa, you'll be thrown out.

But why would they allow a US Marine in? I genuinely don't understand that.

Well, they don't know his coming. They haven't been told his coming. He turns up and they're absolutely astounded. So he is in touch with Intourist, which is the tourist board. Basically, everything has to be done when you go to the communist bloc through the state-approved tourist boards. He arrives in Moscow and he says to the tourist people, I want to become a Soviet citizen, and they don't know what to do with him. They're completely baffled. This does not happen all the time.

He's not saying he's being persecuted in America or anything?

He says he doesn't like America and he wants to become Russian. He obviously hasn't been persecuted, Tom, so he can't claim asylum realistically. Actually, the Soviet and KGB officials are just utterly bewildered by him. The KGB ask the obvious question, is he a spy? They think, well, he can't be a spy because CIA spies don't get a train and pitch up and say, I'd like to become Russian. It's too obvious. Maybe it's a cunning double-bluff. Yeah, maybe. Actually, five days after he's arrived, they say to him, listen, you can't stay completely understandably and reasonably because they think this is weird. This doesn't happen. This is against the rules. What he does is he tries to kill himself in his hotel. He cuts his wrist. They take him to a hospital, they send him to a psychiatric hospital and they say, Well- All right, go on. They basically say, You can stay while we have a think, while we think what to do. While they're thinking what to do, he goes to the US Embassy and he says, I would like to give up my American citizenship. Soon afterwards, a little story appeared in the American Press.

Madman goes to Russia, basically, and says he no longer wants to be America. But it's not a big story. Nobody in America really thinks that much of it. It's just he's a wacky, eccentric person who has done something very eccentric. The Soviet authorities eventually decide, Well, okay, he can't be a spy because his such an incompetent, inept person, the CIA would never employ such a person. I mean, this is KGB, when the archives were open in the 1990s. They said, We looked into Oswil, but we concluded we knew how the CIA worked. They were pretty good. They would never employ such a person.

Unless, as you say, it's a fiendishly, cunning, double-blub.

Well, here's the thing. He's sent off to Minzk in Belarus, and he works in this electronics factory making radios and stuff. He works as a lath operator. Now, again, if he's there as a spy, what's he spying on? Soviet lath technique. I mean, it's laughable. So he's very miserable. He spends the next year or so in Minzk. Obviously, he dreamt that the grass was green. He thought this was the communist paradise and it turns out to be rubbish.

But also perhaps he thought that he would be welcomed.

As a- Of course. He thought he would go on this adventure and he would be a hero. He would be somebody. And he's a nobody again. I mean, he's a nobody with no friends in Minz. He writes to the US Embassy and actually says, I've changed my mind, actually. And the KGB intercepted the letter, interestingly, and then they forget to send it. This is your classic cockup rather than conspiracy. The KGB intercepted the letter and forgot to forward it to the American Embassy. Then he wrote again to the American Embassy, Why have you not answered my letter? I want to come home, and all this. Now, just in the middle of all this, he meets a girl, a pharmacology student called Marina Prusakova, who's from Archangel. She's only 19. Lee is still only 21. They're very young. They have a whirlwind romance. Insofar as Lee Howeby Oswold is capable of a whirlwind romance because he's not exactly the most glamorous and romantic character. After six weeks in April 1961, they get married and they have a very tempestuous relationship.

You.

Astonish me. The KGB are always their wiretaps, because they're obviously spying on him the whole time. They still don't trust him. And the KGB wiretaps find that they're always rowing and arguing and threatening to walk out and stuff. But their first child, June, is born in February 1962. And at this point, Oswold is still very keen on going home to the United States. The KGB have now totally looked into him because they wouldn't let him go if they thought there was any possibility that he was working for the CIA or the FBI or whoever it might be. The thing is, what information could he possibly have?

Well, as you said, information on lathes in Minzk.

Yeah, I mean, there's.

Nothing- Lathes production.

-the KGB, who are the world's most suspicious people, have decided this guy is just a complete freak and a loaner.

Let him go. And Marina as well is given permission. They're happy for her to go too.

Yeah, because Marina is a nobody. Marina is a 19-year-old nobody.

She's not a dissident or anything.

No, she's not a dissident. She's not on anything. They just think, Who cares? Let them go. So May 62, Oswold and Marina go to the US Embassy. He reclaims his American citizenship, gets documents that allow her to come with him because she's his wife. The American Embassy, this is a great thing for conspiracy theories. The American Embassy give him a loan to help his repatriation expenses of $435.

I don't know, again, is it against the American law to renounce your citizenship and then- No.

These things happen. You're a young man, early 20s. You've gone on a backpacking trip that's got totally out of hand. You go to your embassy and you say, Please, can you help me back home? And the consular official looks, gives you a severe, withering look and says, Did you not try to give up your citizenship two years ago? Have you not behaved in a ludicrous manner? Very well. Listen, don't do this again. Here's $400. Back you go.

All right. But again, just to play devil's advocate. I suppose it's not on the same scale because the Islamic State committed terrible crimes, but there were Americans who went to the Islamic State, gave up their American citizenship, and then slightly repented of it and wish they could go back.

But Lihau, Willsworth, has not committed any crimes. It's not a crime to go to Russia.

But they must be thinking maybe he's a spy.

Well, obviously, he comes to people's attention after he returns. The FBI are interested in him because he's just come back from... He's a former Marine who has been in the Soviet Union. They would not be doing their job if they didn't raise an eyebrow at him. But everybody who comes into contact with Oswold says he's a loser, he's a fantasist. He's clearly not an enemy agent because he's so unreliable, so insubordinate, so difficult. He's not intelligent enough to be a useful gatherer of information. So people discount him and they just say, Fine, let it... I mean, that's the attitude. It's so interesting that it's the attitude of both the Russians and the Americans. Oh, God, let him go. They come back to the United States with their infant daughter, June. This is the middle of 1962, and Lee, he's looking forward to this exciting reception when he'll be somebody. And everyone will say, What a tremendous person. He's been on this great adventure and nobody cares. Yet again, he's heading into obscurity.

Okay, so he comes back and when he returns to the United States, he settles in the Dallas, Fort Worth area where his mother has moved to. We are the middle of 1962 and Lee Harvey Oswold is now in Dallas. When we come back, we will look at the final stages of this grim story. We'll see you in a few minutes. Bye-bye. Hello, welcome back to The Rest of History. We are entering the final segment of this great epic sweep through the story of GSK and his murder. Dominic Lee Harvey Oswold is now in situ in Dallas with his Russian wife, Marina, their daughter, June, what's.

Going on? We're in the middle of 1962. Lee, his great adventure to the Soviet Union has not worked out as he thought. He works as a sheep metal worker initially in the Dallas Fort Worth area. He throws that job up pretty quickly, doesn't like it, leaves. He becomes a worse in a photo print company as a trainee. He's fired from that for being insubordinate and difficult. He is now a very aggressive, sudden, troubled, and truculent young man. He's always getting into fights. He beats his wife, who often has bruises and black eyes. He's still interested in his communism. He has not lost that faith. But his real passion, which I mean, I probably should have mentioned earlier, but his real passion is for Cuba. It is Cuba that he romanticizes. Tom, we know people have done that for decades afterwards. They romanticize Cuba, the Cuban Revolution. They see it as exotic, as the underdog story.

And does his fascination with Cuba succeed his fascination with Russia? Goes to Russia and it's all miserable and lathes and cold and whatever, empty supermarkets. Then he starts thinking of Cuba because it's romantic and beards and all that.

Beards, exactly. I do wonder whether it's exactly that. He was obviously interested in Cuba from 1959 onwards when the Cuban Revolution happened. But Cuba loom so large in the American consciousness now you've had the Bay of Pigs invasion, you've had the Cuba missile crisis. Fidel Castro is always in the news. Cuba is lovely and warm, palm trees, rum. As you say, it's romantic guerrillas in combat fatigues. You can absolutely see why a troubled young man who has completely bought into the Marxist theory of history would romanticize Cuba.

And who is still being dumped on by American capitalism.

Yeah, because his life is still rubbish, actually. It still hasn't really worked out. We go into 1963. Here is what we know. Now, people have absolutely poured over the details of Oswold's life. But these are some of the things that we do know for sure. We know, I think, beyond any reasonable doubt that on the 12th of March, 1963, he bought this mail order rifle under a false name, AJ Heidel. Now, why is Lee Harvey Oswold using a false name, you might say, if he's just an ordinary person and not a secret agent, it's because he hates authority. So almost instinctively, he doesn't want to give his real name. But also he's a fantasist who thinks he's living in a world of espionage and dark deeds.

But presumably also, if he is thinking about actually using this gun on someone, then he wants to cover his tracks as.

Well, right? Possibly. But I don't think he's thinking about using it on Kennedy because he can have no reasonable expectation that he and Kennedy will ever be in the same place at the same time.

But doesn't he, before Kennedy, he tries to assassinate this guy, Major General Edwin Walker, who's a segregationist living in Dallas? Yeah. So do you think he gets the gun with that.

In mind? Could well do. Could well do, Tom. Edwin Walker. So we've said many times in this series about how in the early 1960s, there is this seething, it's more than an undercurrent, it is a stream. It is a babbling brook of discontent.

It's not a babbling brook. Surely it's a turbid torrent.

It's a turbid torrent. Very good. It's a turbid torrent. Yeah, babbling brook was totally wrong. Babbling brook is like when we do a podcast about poetry in Edwardian England. Wordsworth. But it's a turbid torrent of right-wing discontent and conspiracy theories and stuff. One of the people stirring this up is this guy, Major General Edwin Walker, who says Kennedy is in bed with Communists and black activists and all this stuff. He's very against civil rights. Oswalt has clearly read up on him in all his journals and decides he's going to kill him, goes to his house in Dallas, he shoots Edwin Walker and the bullet hits the window sill or something like that, or the window frame? He had left a note for Marina to say goodbye. You've probably never seen me again. Thinking he would either be killed or he'll be arrested. But actually, he comes home very sheepish and shame-faced because he's tried and failed to shoot Major General Edwin Walker. Now, if you believe this story and there's no reason to doubt it whatsoever, then you have to accept that Lee Hervey Oswold is somebody who is already thinking about assassinating public figures and is capable of taking the shot.

Worth mentioning in that context that, of course, on the 22nd of November, 1963, he takes off his wedding ring and he leaves all his money for Marina.

Doesn't he? Which he does. Yes, exactly right. The Edwin Walker thing hasn't worked out.

Dominic, can I just ask you on the Edwin Walker thing? Presumably, he doesn't get... I mean, nobody fingers him for this because otherwise.

He wouldn't know. Actually, Theo is asking exactly the same question. How could he try to shoot a member of the armed forces and try to get away with it? It's at Walker's home. Walker is a former member of the armed forces. It's in the dark, it's at night. He shoots from an alley or something into the house, through the yard, and then he scuttles off. Actually, how would you catch him? He's gone. He didn't kill him, so there's not a huge investigation into it or anything like that.

So how do they know that he.

Did it? He tells Marina. I think it's Marina who tells people that this is what Lee said he had done. So he moves to New Orleans for a bit, where he'd been born. He forms a local branch there of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which is a left-wing, Let's stick up for Cuba group. He's briefly arrested in New Orleans for scuffling with anti-castro activists. And then in September, this is a very peculiar incident when he takes a bus to Mexico City across the border, and he goes to the consulates of both Cuba and the USSR to try to get a visa for Cuba.

Okay, so you can't just turn up in.

Cuba then? No, you need a visa. Well, you need a visa because how are you going... There's no... How are you going to get there? Yeah, how are you going to get there? No ferry. Actually, everybody drags their feet. It doesn't happen. Eventually, he gives up and he comes back home to Dallas. At that point, he has no connection whatsoever with the Texas Book Depository. But on the 14th of October, 12 days after his return to Dallas, so his wife has been in Irving living with this Quaker woman called Ruth Payne, rooming with her basically. Ruth Payne says to Lee when he comes to call, Oh, there's a job going at the Book Depositry. Just taking school books to an elevator, basically. Not a very exciting job, but the job that Lee could do.

But also, Don, just to say that if you see yourself as an intellectual, I mean, that must be very humiliating to be carting textbooks around. So maybe that's further incentivizing him with hostility to the system that failed to recognize his talents and give him the opportunities that perhaps it should have done.

That's perfectly plausible, Tom. By that point, by the way, the FBI in Dallas are well aware of him. He has come to their attention. This is a source of great embarrassment to them after the assassination. They've actually gone and spoken to his wife, Marina, and to this couple of pains, the Quakers, about him and are looking into him. But of course, they don't think he's any big threat. They don't take him terribly seriously. When he finds out they've been doing this and the people have been asking questions, he becomes inflamed, furious. He hates the idea of the authorities checking up on him. But anyway, he's got this job at the book's repository, and for the first few weeks at least, it goes okay. He hasn't yet been fired. On about the seventh and eighth of November, these are the dates, the Dallas papers start to announce that John F. Kennedy and his wife will come to the city. There is no way Lee Harvey Oswold could have known this before this point. Okay. Everything before this point, in a way, is irrelevant because up to this point, there was no way that Lee Harvey Oswold could ever expect to have an opportunity to kill Kennedy.

So all this idea that the trip to Mexico and the Gedwin Walker were all part of this long laid plan, that cannot be true because there was no way they could know that the stars would be aligned.

Yeah, it's entirely opportunistic.

Entirely opportunistic. On the 15th of November, so that is what, seven days before the assassination? The Dallas papers actually said there probably won't be a motorcade through the city. But then four days later, the Dallas papers report, there will be a motor case and this is the route and the route is going to go past the depository. That is the 19th of November. It was on that day that I think the idea must first have occurred to Lee Harvey Oswold, that the guy who is the personification of American capitalism, that is personification of its policy towards Cuba, an enemy of revolution, a patrician, rich, handsome, successful, everything he despises that this man will be driven right past the building in which he works in an open car at a very slow pace with the world looking on. Is it plausible that at that point, Lee Harvey Oswold thought, This is my chance to write my name into the history books and to have people doing podcasts about me in 2023? I think eminently plausible, Tom. Psychologically, it makes total sense. There is nothing in this story that I think would make you think, Well, he wouldn't have done that.

Well, that wouldn't have happened. I think it all fits.

Could we just recap the circumstances in that story? Now that you've given us this brilliant psychological portrait of Lee Harvey Oswold and the account of his life, how that would then fit basically what the evidence is that had led the Dallas police to conclude it's a cinch.

I think there are something like 50-60 individual pieces of evidence that they compiled that led them to create to this jigsaw puzzle. We can't go through all those. We know that on the Thursday night, the night before the murder, he did something he had never done before, which is on a weeknight to go out to Irving to visit Marina and to collect a package, which he later described as curtain rods.

Right. So this is the gun.

Which is the gun. We know that the following day, Lee Howe-Vie Oswood was at the Texas Book Depository that he arrived that morning. We know that multiple witnesses saw what they thought was an assassin on the sixth floor of that building. We know that later on, the police found a snipers nest there, and they found a gun. Now, it's true. People made competing claims about men running on grass and all shots coming from different areas. But there are a heck of a lot of witnesses who say they see somebody in the Texas Book Depositry and the fact of the murder weapon being found there and the fact that at least some, if not most, forensic experts say the shots did come from that direction and could have come from that direction, that suggests a reasonably plausible case. We know that Lee Harvey Oswood was the only employee of the Texas Book Depositry who at any point said he had been on the sixth floor. He contradicted himself in the interviews, but at one point he does put himself on the sixth floor. We also know, I think very revealingly, he's the only employee of the building who leaves the building.

Everybody else stays. He leaves immediately after the shooting. We know that he then behaves very weirdly. He gets on a bus, he waits on the bus, the bus is stuck in traffic. He then gets off the bus and gets a taxi, which is something that as somebody with very little money, he never, ever, ever did. Then we know he goes home to get his revolver. A policeman flags him down, J. D. Tippet. He shoots and kills Tippet, which is something that innocent people don't tend to do. I mean, if a policeman flags down this afternoon, Tom, I find it implausible. You will shoot him.

Well, unless I suppose just assassinated someone, which hopefully I won't have done. But just to ask, what's his plan? If he has shot Kennedy and he's leaving the book depository, where is he going? What does he think he's going to do? Why is he getting the revolver?

He's getting the revolver because he thinks something may happen this afternoon. Maybe they'll come for me.

But where do you think he's planning to go?

Perhaps he's going to go back to Mexico City, make another attempt to get to Cuba.

Right, okay.

Yeah, that's plausible. Who knows? I don't think... The interesting thing is I don't think.

He.

Wants to be go unrecognized.

There is a tension there, isn't there? He wants to be caught in.

A way. That must be the case with almost all Assassin's. I mean, the case with John Hinkley who shot Ronald Reagan, with Arthur Bremer who shot George Wallace in 1972.

Mark David Chapman who shot John.

Lennon, of course. John Lennon with Sihan Sihan who shot Robert Kennedy. That there must be an element, I think, in all those cases of wanting to be caught because you want your story to be told, I would say, because there's such an element of fantasy and being the character in the drama about all of these incidents. Anyway, go back to Oswold. When he's arrested in the cinema, the movie theater, he violently resists arrest and tries to pull the gun. Again, an unlikely thing for an innocent man to do. When he's led into the Dallas police headquarters, he gives a clenched fist salute, the salute of a Marxist. Seems an unlikely thing again for somebody totally, falsely used to do. Similarly unlikely is his detached, sullent demeanor under interrogation and indeed, not joking, but making offhand remarks. What does he say? I hear they fry for murder or something like that. Would you do that, Tom, if you were falsely accused?

I hope never to find out. I hope never to find out.

He told lies under interrogation. Very rare for people who are falsely accused to do this. He lied about fetching the curtain rods. He lied about buying the rifle. He lied about the himself with the rifle, which I think most experts think, not all, but most experts think is completely authentic. Finally, I think for me, very persuasive, his own wife, Marina, thinks he did it when she comes to see him, as does his brother, Robert. They are both shocked by his demeanor and extremely worried right from the beginning because they think he is behaving as he would if he had done it. He is not behaving as he would if he was innocent, if he was framed. The big quibble is whether he could have fired so many shots in so short a time.

But he's been trained as a Marine, as a sharpshooter. You said that.

He has been trained as a Marine and contrary to what is the six, I only recently saw the scene in the film, JFK. Kevin Costner is up on the sixth floor with his pal, and they're practicing taking the shots and they're just saying, It couldn't be done. It couldn't be done. But it has been done. It has been duplicated many times by different marksmen who have not merely duplicated by the way, but improved on the Assassin's performance with a similar rifle. The other quibble is about this so-called magic bullet. The Oliver Stone film suggests that the bullet could not have passed through Kennedy's throat and into John Connolly's back. Again, there are many experts who say, Actually, it perfectly well, could have done. Connolly was not sitting directly in front of Kennedy. He was slightly below him and six inches to the left, and he had turned away to the crowds. So it is possible.

Wasn't there something also about Kennedy's jacket gets bunched up? The bullet hole through the jacket or something like that, I.

Can't remember. Yes, exactly. The thing is that with any crime of this kind, you can pour over every detail and find inconsistencies because such is the nature of history and human affairs, Tom.

The.

Question then is, why did Lee Harvey Oswold do it? I have poured scorn on the idea that the CIA did it, for example, because I don't think it's plausible that the CIA acts in such a way on American soil, and I don't think they have an obvious motive. Lee Harvey Oswold is precisely the person who does act this way. He's already tried to kill somebody else, and he killed Tippet, and he pulled his revolver in the movie theater. He is a violent man.

And do you think, again, we've been talking about his feelings of resentment, his feelings that he should have a status in society that he's been denied. Do you think the fact that Kennedy is so famously charismatic, so famously handsome, he's been born with this silver spoon in his mouth, maybe that makes him even more appealing as.

A target. Oh, he's such a satisfying target for us all, doesn't he? I mean, there would be people listening to the first episodes of this series who would probably say, Oh, they were very soft on Kennedy. They were very... Because I think a lot of people have an automatic resentment of Kennedy because he's so, apart from his horrendous health, it seems the fate has given him every blessing. He's handsome, he's rich, he has a relatively, I mean, his father is carrying on with all his actresses, but he has a fairly stable family. He's clever. But what's worse? I mean, the thing that always inflames people is very funny, is very graceful. You can imagine at Harvard, there must have been so many people who hated him because he just seemed so spoiled by fate to have all these qualities. Lee, Harvey, I thought it must have driven him mad.

I mean, the famous, the archetype of this is Herestratus, the Greek who burnt down, supposedly, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, purely so that he would be remembered. Do you think there's an element of that?

Yeah, political assassinations, there's always a copycat thing. The Le have one, of course, is the first, and then lots of people copy him. But the people who copy him are very like him. The Travis Bickle, Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver archetype, people who are losers who feel disappointed that things have gone against them, his profile, going right back to those first profiles that were written about him as a teenager, fits the person that we know these killers are. People who do this are like Lee Harvey Oswold. If you were looking for somebody to fit the profile, he would.

Be the man. But even if it didn't, I think just on the principle of Occam's razor that you don't overcomplicate solutions, that the simplest, clearest solution is likely to be the correct one. It really does point to Lee Harvey Oswold because conspiracies complicate things, don't they?

They do. They do. And people love it for that reason. They love to overcomplicate. They love to believe that they are in possession of secret knowledge that other people don't have. Secret knowledge that not just explains this crime, Tom, because if this is done by the CIA, working with the mafia, this unlocks all American political history because you realize that actually a shadowy group of people have been controlling the whole thing. You know this and your neighbor doesn't. So emotionally satisfying.

That's why it fascinates so much. That's why there have been so many films, so many TV episodes, so many novels.

Yeah, but I think it fascinates for another reason as well. The Kennedy assassination happens at precisely the point when the optimism of the 60s is just about to turn. So whether it contributes to that, well, it obviously does contribute to it, because, of course, what happens in just a few years, and this is why I think the fact that the garrison case and the Jim Garrison investigation to Clay Shaw in New Orleans, and then The Wave of assassination books, the fact they happened in 1966, 67, 68, I think it's no coincidence they happened then because that's the point at which America is engulfed in the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. It has been overtaken by stories about law and order and rioting and so on.

So it's going a little bit Malcolm X.

Yes. And the soundtrack is now The Doors rather than The Beat Boys or whatever. The Kennedy assassination has come to serve as this punctuation point. That's why it attracts so much attention.

And it's also said there have been a number of novels in which people time travel and stop the assassination. So Stephen King.

The one.

11, 22, 63, that very weird American way that they organize their dates. Apologies to Americanists in this.

But it is odd. But it is poor. I mean, that should be the takeaway from this. They need to sort their dating system out.

But in that one, I think Kennedy saved, and then there's a nuclear war in 1974 or something as a result. And there are various other ones as well. That sense that it's the key.

Turning point. Which, of course, it isn't, though, Tom, because had Kennedy lived, he would have faced this dilemma in his second term about whether to stay in Vietnam, to actually commit more troops to Vietnam, or whether to leave. Either way, he would have been criticized. Whether he would have left office with his reputation as high seems very unlikely. But would he have been able to fix all these problems, civil rights, the economy entering the downturn of the late '60s, early '70s, all of those things, the law and order issue, anxieties about drugs and college campuses and all that stuff. Would the presence of this one man have fixed that? Obviously not. Obviously not.

So, Dominic, what you're saying is that after seven episodes, it wasn't really very important.

No, I think it's hugely important, actually. I think it's because it's a sensational subject and there are a lot of bonkers people who are interested in it, academic historians tend to fight shy of it. They don't write books about it. For utterly understandable reasons. But I think the Kennedy conspiracy stuff has played a pretty big part in the rise of populism and in this paranoid conspiracy theory politics that you have in America. So the idea of a deep state, the idea that anybody who challenges it will be rubbed out, the idea that there's this sinister, shadowy cabal, an establishment cabal with links to the military-industrial complex, to business, to organized crime, to government agencies. That, in the last 10 years or so, has become more and more embedded in the American political mainstream, hasn't it? The Q-anon stuff.

Despite the fact that, as you said, if there was a deep state, you think it would have stepped in to sort.

Things out. Exactly. But as we approach the next American presidential election next year, there will be lots of people talking about the deep state more vigorously and fervently than ever. So the legacy, I mean, this would have happened even without the Kennedy assassination, because as we said in the last episode, episode. This populist paranoia is deeply embedded in the American political tradition. But the Kennedy conspiracy stuff seemed to take it to its apotheosis, I think.

Okay, so well worth having done seven episodes on. Thank you, Dominic. It's been absolutely fascinating. Like everyone, I had a vague sense of the details, but I've really, really enjoyed the opportunity to get to grips with it and to get on top of just the process of what happened and all the various series about it. So thank you so much for guiding me and for guiding everyone else through this extraordinary story.

Tom, you've been very tolerant in allowing me to do so much on it.

No, not at all. I have found it completely fascinating and I entirely understand why people are obsessed by it. It is an extraordinary story.

What you're not telling people is that you yourself have fallen down this rabbit hole, haven't you? Because you've been watching all kinds of terrible documentaries about it.

I have. But I'm reassured that I haven't been convinced by any of them. Because first of all, I'd immersed myself in the details of what had actually happened. I can spot where things don't.

Entirely fit. Theo, we've seen who Theo thinks it is.

Theo still thinks it's LBJ. He is a grassy null truther. On that bombshell, thank you all very much for listening. Thank you, Dominic, and we will be back. Thanks very much. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.