Assassin Kills Kennedy

Yes I do remember where I was that day in 1963: a fraternity house at the University of Nebraska.  I was walking down the hallway when a fraternity brother talking on a pay wall phone (remember those?) shouted out what someone on the other end of the line had told him: President Kennedy had been shot.  Days later I watched mesmerized as Jack Ruby fired a shot into Lee Harvey Oswald, killing the assassin and destroying our chances to ever know why he really did it. But a new book entitled The Interloper: Lee Harvey Oswald Inside the Soviet Union by Peter Savodnik gives a pretty good idea. Enchanted by utopian visions of the Communist Empire, Oswald managed to eventually wend his way into a disenchanting, several-year sojourn behind the Iron Curtain.  According to Savodnik, Oswald’s mind was “filled with fantasies of a country [the Soviet Union] that had never existed.” Once Oswald figured that out, he slit his wrists in a Minsk bathtub filled with cold water. He survived, thanks to the KGB who was spying on him.  Even after the suicide attempt he declared, “In the event of a war, I would kill any American who put a uniform on in defense of the American government.” But the Soviets considered him a liability, a crazy man they didn’t want as a comrade. Oswald married a Russian woman and tried to live a normal, communist life; eventually he returned to the America he hated, to kill its leader in cold blood.

“Why?” is a question never fully answered, but there are clues. Strip aside his leftist leanings and you find a soul, portrayed by Savodnik, as someone who “hoped to find what his mother had never provided for him: a home, a stable landscape of friends and neighbors.” The anger and instability from his troubled upbringing led Oswald to externally scapegoat capitalists as the misdirected focus for his internal bitterness toward a father who died before he was born and a promiscuous mother who jumped from one man to another.  What really led to the killing of Kennedy was not political ideology but rather Oswald’s curse of abandonment, rejection, and emotional instability. Had he been raised in a two-parent, Christian home, that dark day, 50 years ago, November 22, 1963, might never have happened. Oswald didn’t need another country; he needed what he never got: unconditional love, a heart turned to Jesus instead of Lenin, and healing prayer for his hurts.