Lee Harvey Oswald Biography

Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963.

Lee Harvey Oswald was a drifter with a murky past; he had been dishonorably discharged from the U.S. Marines and then defected to Russia in 1959, only to be refused citizenship there and sent back to the United States.

Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy with a sniper’s rifle from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository as the president’s motorcade traveled through Dallas. Oswald was arrested hours later in a movie theater, after also shooting and killing police officer J.D. Tippit. Oswald was never tried: two days later he himself was shot to death by nightclub owner Jack Ruby as Oswald was being transferred inside Dallas police headquarters.

Conspiracy theorists have long insisted that something fishy happened with the Kennedy assassination: that Oswald didn’t do the shooting, or that other shooters were involved, or that Oswald was put up to the job by Russia, the CIA, the Mafia, or some other shadowy organization. Nothing of this sort has ever been proved. In 1964 the so-called Warren Commission — a special investigative body headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren — decided that Oswald, acting alone, had shot and killed the president.