THE DREAMER WHO KILLED A PRESIDENTL NORTH SPORTS FINAL Edition

• Published in: Chicago tribune (1963)
• Main Author: Priscilla Johnson McMillan, Priscilla Johnson McMillan, a fellow at the Russian Research Center and the Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, is the author of "Marina and Lee," a 1977 biography of Lee Harvey Oswald and his
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Chicago, Ill Tribune Interactive, LLC 22.11.1993
• ISSN: 1085-6706

  One reason why Americans still wonder whether Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy and if so whether he acted alone is the incongruousness between victim and assassin. To accept the reality that a president who was young and high-spirited and full of promise could have been cut down by a small, gloomy runt of a man is too much for some of us to bear. To accept this is to accept that we are, every one of us, at the mercy of chance, and that life is a random thing indeed. To look at Oswald, however, is to acquire a different perspective and to see that if Kennedy's career was carefully programmed, Oswald's life, too, pointed him consistently in one direction. Lee Harvey Oswald had two obsessions-politics and violence-that made the assassination, or its emotional equivalent, the inevitable outcome of his life. But he went through life creating so many false trails around himself-through both design and ineptness-that despite his desire to go down in history as the assassin, his own actions have added to the confusion that still surrounds the event. Oswald enlisted in the Marine Corps the day after his 17th birthday in 1956, not because he had become an American patriot but because he was following the same route his brothers had chosen to escape from their mother, Marguerite Oswald. In his barracks at El Toro, Calif., at Subic Bay in the Philippines and, again, in Japan, Oswald made a display of his study of the Russian language. As soon as he was able, he quit the Marines, hopped on a freighter bound from New Orleans to Le Havre, and made his way to Moscow.