A Man's World by Donald McRae

Author:Donald McRae [McRae, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

Cuba, and a fuzzy idea of freedom from capitalism, was at work in Lee Harvey Oswald’s addled brain for years before two shots from his rifle killed John F. Kennedy on 22 November 1963. A former marine, who had defected to the Soviet Union for two-and-a-half years, Oswald and his Russian wife had been allowed to return to the US in June 1962. His disillusionment with the Soviet system meant that Oswald had come to regard Castro’s Cuban revolution as an ideal form of Marxism.

Oswald’s anger towards Kennedy had been sparked by the president’s support of the botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. In late September 1963, Oswald took a bus to Mexico City in the hope that he would be granted a visa to Cuba, where he planned to defect. That aim was blunted when Oswald was told he could only gain entry into Cuba during transit to the Soviet Union – whose embassy in Mexico City stressed it would take months to process his application.

A dejected Oswald then headed for Dallas. Amid increasing feelings of alienation and disillusionment with America, and hearing of Kennedy’s presidential visit on 22 November, he began to plot his assassination.

After the shooting, he was arrested just before midnight on a charge that he did, ‘in furtherance of an international Communist conspiracy, assassinate President John F. Kennedy’.

The United States would never be the same again after those tumultuous few months in 1963. Martin Luther King’s speech, and Kennedy’s assassination, changed everything.

Oswald was killed thirty-six hours after his arrest when, leaving a police station in Dallas on his way to prison, he was gunned down by Jack Ruby, a strip club owner suspected of supplying weapons to rebel fighters in Cuba. Ruby’s real name was Jacob Rubenstein and he had been boyhood friends with Barney Ross, one of the greatest fighters in history, who won world titles at lightweight, light-welter and welterweight in the 1930s. On the night earlier that year when Griffith regained his welterweight crown from Rodriguez at the Garden, Ross had been called into the ring to receive the plaudits of the crowd.

Ruby’s assassination of Kennedy’s killer was captured on network TV. After Benny Paret, Lee Harvey Oswald was only the second man in history whose death was seen on live television. America had become a much darker place in the bloody autumn of 1963.

Emile Griffith was announced as the Fighter of the Year by the Boxing Writers Association in early December 1963. He had lost to Luis Rodriguez in March, on that devastating night at Dodger Stadium, but he had since won back his title and also defeated Holly Mims and Jose Gonzales. As a three-time world welterweight champion, he had entered the boxing pantheon. He would receive his award in January but, before then, on 20 December 1963, he faced Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter in Pittsburgh.

Two-and-a-half years later, in June 1966, Carter would be arrested for a triple homicide he did not commit. He would spend twenty years in prison,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.