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Oswald life time line Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
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Who was Lee Harvey Oswald - Timeline
Twenty-Four Years
A chronology of Lee Harvey Oswald's life, drawn primarily from FRONTLINE's three-hour investigative biography, with links to photos, writings, and documents gathered by the 1964 Warren Commission investigation and the 1978-79 House Select Committee on Assassinations.
1939 Oct. 18
Lee Harvey Oswald is born in New Orleans, Louisiana, the son of Marguerite and Robert Oswald, Sr. Two months before his birth, his father dies of a heart attack. Marguerite Oswald is left alone to care for Lee and his two older brothers -- his half-brother, John Pic, and Robert Jr.
1942 -- Marguerite sends the boys into an orphanage and later to boarding school. Lee is rejected at first because he is too young. But his mother reapplies and sends him off to the orphanage after he turns four.
1952-53
At age 12, Lee and his mother move to New York City, where they live in a small apartment in the Bronx. While Marguerite works days in a dress shop, Lee spends his time alone at the public library and museums -- and endless hours riding the New York City subway system.
Although enrolled in the eighth grade, Lee doesn't set foot in school for almost two months. One day, a truant officer notices Lee at one of his havens, the Bronx Zoo.
Lee is taken to court and then sent to a youth detention center for three weeks of psychiatric evaluation. His social worker, Evelyn Siegel, recalls him vividly. "He was a skinny, unprepossessing kid. He was not a mentally disturbed kid. … He was just emotionally frozen. He was a kid who had never developed a really trusting relationship with anybody. From what I could garner, he really interacted with no one. He made his own meals. His mother left at around 7:00 and came home at 7:00 and he shifted for himself. You got the feeling of a kid nobody gave a darn about."
1955 -- Lee joins the Civil Air Patrol, a youth auxiliary of the Air Force. He tries to lie his way into the Marines but is rejected as too young.
1956 Just after turning seventeen, Oswald enlists in the Marines. It is the height of the Cold War. Oswald receives extensive training in marksmanship. Fellow Marines remember him as a poor shot, but the record indicates otherwise, and the sergeant in charge of his training called Oswald "a slightly better than average shot for a Marine, excellent by civilian standards."
1957 -- Lee is shipped out for a posting at an Air Force defense base at Atsugi, Japan. Atsugi is also a CIA base. The CIA program there involves the U-2 spy plane, the mission of which was to invade Russian air space and photograph Soviet strategic sites.
1958 -- A year after entering the Marines, Oswald wounds himself with a pistol that he's not supposed to have and is court-martialed for possession of an illegal firearm and put on K.P. duty.
After attacking the sergeant who he believes is responsible for his K.P. punishment, Oswald is court-martialed a second time and put into the brig. He comes out an embittered person.
1959 Nearing the end of his duty in California, Oswald starts making careful preparations to go to Russia, applying first to the Albert Schweitzer college in Switzerland. After getting his passport, he travels first to France and England and on to Helsinki, one of the few cities where an American can get a visa to Russia on short notice.
Oct. 17
On his second day in Moscow, Oswald tells his Intourist guide he wants to defect because he doesn't approve of the U.S. way of life.
In his later written appeal he says he wants Soviet citizenship because "I am a communist and a worker and I have lived in a decadent capitalist society where the workers are slaves." The KGB considers his request, but Vladimir Semichastny, the former head of the KGB who had handled Oswald's case, says their first reaction was to refuse him permission to stay.
Oswald is shocked by the Soviets' refusal to give him asylum. A short time later, he is found in his hotel bathtub with slit wrists. Unconscious, he is taken to the hospital and afterwards transferred to the psychiatric ward.
Oct. 31
Oswald goes to the U.S. Embassy to renounce his U.S. citizenship and demands to see the U.S. Consul, Richard Snyder. Says Snyder: "He also volunteered the information that he'd been -- while in the Marines -- a radar technician and that when he became a Soviet citizen, he intended to offer to the Soviet authorities everything that he had learned." Snyder reports Oswald's intentions to Washington. Marines change their radar codes and begin proceedings for an "undesirable discharge" for Oswald.
Yekaterina Furtseva, the highest-ranking woman in the Politburo under Nikita Khrushchev, champions Oswald's cause and demands the KGB reverse its decision and allow him to stay.
1960 Jan. 4
Oswald is told by Soviet authorieties he is being sent to Minsk. With the ordeal in Moscow over, Oswald now has the chance to become what he had always wanted to be, a model young Marxist. Soviet authorities set him up in style. Despite a chronic housing shortage, he is given a choice apartment, a luxury unheard of for a young bachelor.
In Minsk, Oswald's job is to build prototypes of new models at the radio and television factory. The KGB keeps Oswald under constant surveillance and co-opts most of the people he meets.
After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, KGB officer Vacheslav Nikonov reviewed the entire Oswald file. He tells FRONTLINE: "Oswald looked very suspicious to the KGB and to the [Minsk] factory authorities because he was not interested in Marxism. He didn't attend any Marxist classes. He didn't read any Marxist literature and he didn't attend even the labor union meetings. So the question was, what was he doing there?"
Shunned by his co-workers, Oswald befriends some college students interested in learning English.
1961 Jan. 20 John F. Kennedy is sworn in as President of the United States.
Feb. 13 -- Disillusioned with life in the Soviet Union, Oswald notifies the U.S. Embassy that he wishes to return to America. He writes in his diary, "The work is drab. The money I get has nowhere to be spent. As my Russian improves, I become increasingly conscious of just what sort of a society I live in."
April 30
Oswald marries Marina Prusakova at the home of her uncle, just six weeks after being introduced to her at a Palace of Culture dance. Because her uncle worked for Soviet domestic intelligence, questions later were raised about whether Marina herself was an agent.
The KGB continues bugging Oswald's apartment and monitors everything that goes on inside. According to Vladimir Semichastny: "We concluded that he was not working for American intelligence. His intellectual training experience and capabilities were such that it would not show the FBI and the CIA in a good light if they used people like him."
1962 June 2
After persisting for 18 months, Oswald finally gets permission from Soviet and U.S. authorities to return to the U.S. with Marina and their daughter, June. Oswald's two-and-a-half-year Russian journey is over. The Oswalds move in with Lee's brother in Fort Worth, Texas.
Soon after, the FBI interviews him about his time in the Soviet Union. According to the FBI report, he is in an aggressive, surly mood and gives evasive answers.
The CIA has always maintained it never talked to Oswald, despite evidence to the contrary. One former CIA officer says he read an agency debriefing of Oswald in 1962. "It was a debriefing of a Marine re-defector. He was returning with his family from the Soviet Union and was back in the United States. It was signed off by a CIA officer by the name of Anderson."
October
The Oswalds move to Dallas, Texas, where they are befriended by a group of Russian emigres who help them settle in. One of them, George de Mohrenschildt, had originally come from Minsk and helps Oswald find a job at a photo lab downtown.
Oswald uses the photo lab's equipment to forge a new identity, including a Selective Service card, in the name of Alek J. Hidell. It is the first alias Oswald is known to have used. Oswald is beginning to construct a secret life. He opens a Post Office Box to receive mail for himself and Hidell.
November
At the same time his interest in politics is growing. As far back as the Marines, Oswald had been receiving left-wing newspapers and he becomes enamored with Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution. He now views Cuba as the Marxist ideal and is highly critical of the U.S. administration's policies toward Castro.
1963 Late March
Oswald gives a copy of the photograph to his friend George de Mohrenschildt. On the back, someone has written "Hunter of Fascists" in Russian, and Oswald has signed it. His signature is later verified beyond a doubt by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA).
April 6 -- Oswald is fired from his job at the photo lab. No one knows where he spends his days. Marina says he spent a few evenings shooting target practice.
April 24 -- Oswald arrives in New Orleans alone, leaving his family behind in Texas with a friend. He is about to enter the most mysterious and perplexing chapter of his short life and the murky trail he left behind in New Orleans still defies a complete explanation. If there was a plot to kill President Kennedy, then it was probably hatched in New Orleans. It was here that Lee Oswald may have crossed paths with men that hated Kennedy and wanted him eliminated.
May -- Oswald soon grows bored with his menial job. He shows an interest in guns. But Marxist politics are still his ruling passion and his hero is Fidel Castro. He writes to the leading pro-Castro group in the U.S., the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), offering to start a New Orleans chapter. The committee discourages him, but he ignores them and begins printing his own pro-Castro leaflets and phony membership cards. He asks Marina to help him disguise the fact that he is the only member of his organization.
He distributes the leaflets on the streets of New Orleans and continues to exaggerate the size of his one-man chapter. He also rents a new P.O. Box in the name of A.J. Hidell.
July - August
On July 19, Oswald is fired from the Reily Coffee Company. During the rest of the summer, his activities are puzzling. In August, he approaches the leader of an anti-Castro group, Carlos Bringuier, who says Oswald offered to help in the guerrilla fight against Castro. Oswald also writes the Fair Play for Cuba Committee claiming that one of his pro-Cuba street demonstrations had been attacked by Cuban exiles. No such incident occurred.
Was Oswald playing a kind of double game that summer in New Orleans? One piece of evidence has continued to raise important questions about his true attitude toward Cuba and whose side he was really on.
The return address on Oswald's pro-Castro leaflets was 544 Camp Street, New Orleans. In the same building, a private detective agency was being run by Guy Banister, a former FBI agent working to overthrow Castro. One of Banister's comrades in the anti-Castro fight was a former airline pilot named David Ferrie. There is evidence suggesting Ferrie's and Oswald's paths crossed in the 1950s when both were in the Civil Air Patrol. And there are clues, some say, that their paths may have crossed again in the summer of 1963 in the New Orleans area.
Both Ferrie and Banister did investigative work for Carlos Marcello, Mafia chieftain of New Orleans and a prime target of the Kennedy administration's war on organized crime. If Oswald did have a secret connection to Ferrie and Banister in 1963, the nature of that relationship remains unclear. And any evidence must be weighed against the rest of what is known of his time in New Orleans where he continued to demonstrate for Castro and was invited to debate Bringuier and another anti-Communist on a local radio show.
Aug 21, 1963 -- [ Radio show about his Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) and is discredited by Edward Butler, head of an anti-Communist propaganda organization. ]
Sept. 26 -- Oswald is seen on this day, alone on a bus, heading south from Houston to Mexico City.
Sept. 27 -- Oswald arrives in Mexico City and checks into a hotel. He brings with him a file on his pro-Castro activity in New Orleans. It contains letters from the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, newspaper articles, his hand-written biography and the pamphlets and phony membership cards he had printed. Records at the Hotel Comercio show that it is the real Oswald's handwriting on the register. Oswald visits the Cuban Consulate, where he fills out the application for a visa to Cuba.
Sept. 28 -- Oswald is interviewed by three KGB officers and told that it will take several months to get a Soviet visa and that without one he would be unable to go to Cuba. Oswald takes the news badly. He returns to the Cuban Consulate where he is again rebuffed.
As Oswald leaves the consulate and the embassy, he is being watched by CIA operatives. From a house across the road from the Cuban Consulate, the CIA maintained a continuous photographic surveillance. CIA wiretaps and bugs also record several of Oswald's conversations inside the embassy and consulate.
Oswald stays in Mexico City four days, but in the end both the Russians and the Cubans reject him. His plans to fight for Castro and return to Russia had come to nothing.
Oct. 2 -- Oswald departs on bus #332 from Mexico City and arrives in Dallas the next day. He takes a room at the YMCA. He has no job and no means to support his family. Marina and June are living with their friend, Ruth Paine, in Irving, a Dallas suburb. Marina is expecting their second child.
Oct. 14 -- A neighbor of Mrs. Paine's mentions a possible job opening at the Texas School Book Depository. The next day Oswald applies and is hired as a warehouse clerk to fill orders for textbooks.
Oct. 20 -- Marina gives birth to Audrey Marina Rachel Oswald.
Nov. 22, 1963
12:30 PM: The tragedy unfolds in 21 seconds of eight-millimeter film shot by Abraham Zapruder. As the president's motorcade rounds the corner of Dealey Plaza in front of the Book Depository, it slows. In the background, a little girl runs beside the limousine. Suddenly there's a gunshot. Governor Connolly hears it and turns. The little girl stops and looks around. Three seconds later, a second shot. A bullet passes through the President's throat. It hits Connally in the back and he starts falling. Mrs. Kennedy turns to her husband. Something's wrong. She looks into his face. Then the fatal head shot.
Four U.S. government investigations have concluded that two shots struck the President: the 1964 Warren Commission, the 1968 panel set by Attorney General Ramsey Clark, the 1975 Rockefeller Commission, and the 1978-79 House Select Committee on Assassinations which reexamined the evidence with the help of the largest forensics panel.
Within three minutes of the shooting, Oswald walks out the front door of the Texas School Book Depository. He boards a bus, but jumps out and hails a taxi when the bus gets stuck in traffic. He asks the taxi to drop him a couple of blocks away from his rooming house in Oak Cliff.
11:26 PM: The original complaint that the police department filed on Oswald, around midnight on the 22nd of November, states that Lee Oswald did, "in furtherance of an international communist conspiracy, assassinate President John F. Kennedy."
That night, as Air Force One brings John Kennedy's body home to Washington, President Johnson is afraid that Oswald's apparent communist connections could spark an international crisis. Johnson orders the district attorney to drop any reference to a communist conspiracy. This is a year after the Cuban missile crisis, when the world had come to the brink of nuclear war.
Oswald will be interrogated for two days, but he never confesses.
Ruby is a police informer who owned a striptease club and made sure that policemen who came to his club were shown a good time. He was known to be an impulsive, quick tempered man who loved to fight. He also knew people who were in organized crime. In 1963, Sam and Joe Campisi were leading figures in the Dallas underworld. Jack knew the Campisis and had been seen with them on many occasions. The Campisis were lieutenants of Carlos Marcello, the Mafia boss who had reportedly talked of killing the President.
Nov. 24
Police had announced the previous day that on this morning, at 10 AM, Oswald would be transferred to the county jail.
11:21 AM: Oswald is shot by Ruby. Posner: "Ruby yells as he's shooting, "You killed my president, you rat!" He's then tackled by the police around him and in the few seconds after the shooting through the time he's taken into the jail, he says a series of things. "You guys," meaning the police, "couldn't do it. I did it for you. I had to show that a Jew has guts. I'm happy that I got him."
Ruby has sinister visitors while in jail: Sam and Joe Campisi visited with him and they always had privacy. Those private meetings with the Campisis reawakened suspicions of a Mob hit. But even those who believe the Mafia killed Kennedy and Oswald concede the evidence is not conclusive.
When he spoke to the press after his trial, Ruby himself hinted at conspiracy. But by now his mental condition was deteriorating: "Everything pertaining to what's happening has never come to the surface. The world will never know the true facts of what occurred, my motives."
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