Lee Harvey Oswald

Lee Harvey Oswald shot John F. Kennedy in Dallas on 22 November 1963 and was himself shot two days later in a police basement, in front of television cameras, before he could be tried. He had a disordered childhood in New Orleans and New York, joined the Marines at seventeen, qualified as a marksman and trained as a radar operator, and defected to the Soviet Union in 1959. He lived in Minsk for two and a half years, married Marina Prusakova, found Soviet life disappointing and returned to Texas in 1962 with a State Department loan. In April 1963 he apparently attempted to shoot the right-wing general Edwin Walker and missed. He handed out Fair Play for Cuba leaflets in New Orleans, visited the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City, and took a job at the Texas School Book Depository weeks before the motorcade route was published. The Warren Commission concluded he acted alone; the House Select Committee in 1979 accepted his guilt but thought a conspiracy probable on acoustic evidence later discredited. He denied everything in his two days of custody, calling himself a patsy. Jack Ruby killed him during a jail transfer, which removed any possibility of a trial and guaranteed sixty years of argument. His widow Marina remarried and stayed in Texas. The rifle, a mail-order Carcano bought for less than twenty dollars, is in the National Archives. Polling has consistently found most Americans disbelieving the lone-gunman conclusion, which is less a comment on the evidence than on what Ruby's intervention made impossible.

• Lived: 1939 CE – 1963 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: assassin