The JFK Assassination Debates by Michael L. Kurtz

Author:Michael L. Kurtz [Kurtz, Michael L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Presidents & Heads of State, History, United States, 20th Century, Political Science, History & Theory
ISBN: 9780700614745
Google: BQ93AAAAMAAJ
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Published: 2006-01-15T00:22:44+00:00

6

Lee Harvey Oswald

To all who have studied the assassination, regardless of their perspective, Lee Harvey Oswald clearly emerges as one of the most significant figures. For those who espouse the lone assassin theory, Oswald stands out as the man who committed the crime of the century. For those who espouse conspiracy theories, Oswald also stands out, either as a member of a group of assassins or as a patsy, the scapegoat employed to take the blame while the real assassins made good their escape. Only twenty-four years and one month old when he was gunned down by Jack Ruby, Lee Oswald led a life that to this day remains, to para-phrase Winston Churchill’s famous remark about the Soviet Union, a mystery wrapped up in an enigma inside a puzzle. Despite the extraordinary amount of attention focused on that life, many aspects of it continue to befuddle researchers, and no definitive explanation of Oswald’s precise role in the assassination can yet be given.

Lee Harvey Oswald was born in New Orleans in October 1939. Lee’s father had died of a heart attack two months before he was born, leaving his mother, Marguerite Claviere Oswald, alone to raise Lee, his older brother Robert, and their older half-brother John Pic, the product of Marguerite’s marriage to her first husband, John Edward “Eddie” Pic. Because she worked, Marguerite left the three boys to stay with relatives, and on occasion, Lee and Robert spent time in orphanages. When Lee was five, Marguerite moved to Covington, a small town on the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain (New Orleans is on the south shore), where Lee attended school for the first time. Marguerite then moved to Fort Worth, Texas, where she married her third husband, Edwin Ekdahl, a union that would soon dissolve. In the period 1945 to 1952, Marguerite moved more than a dozen times in the Dallas–Fort Worth area, and Lee found himself attending eleven different grammar schools. Clearly, the experience left the boy without the stability of a place that he could call home, and he never had the opportunity to develop lasting friendships. Some authors, such as Gerald Posner, argue that this continual mobility, combined with Marguerite’s domineering personality and the lack of a man in the household, had a profound impact on the impressionable young boy, prompting him to withdraw into a shell of privacy and to isolate himself from society. This amateur attempt at psychoanalysis fails to account for the fact that Robert and John Pic grew up under identical circumstances and became perfectly normal adults.1

In 1952 Marguerite moved to New York City. There Lee, a young teenager, found himself among strangers in school and often became the object of his classmates’ ridicule because of his Texas accent and mannerisms. Frequently absent from school, he wound up in Youth House for three weeks, during which time he underwent examination by the chief psychiatrist, Dr. Renatus Hartogs, and by members of his staff. Dr. Hartogs diagnosed Lee as suffering from “personality pattern disturbance with schizoid features and passive-aggressive tendencies.

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