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- [00:00]
George Severis
This is an iHeart podcast. I'm George Severis, and this is United States of Kennedy, a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week we go into one aspect of the Kennedy story, and today we are talking about lee Harvey Oswald. 60 years after the JFK assassination, the man arrested for killing him remains one of the most enigmatic figures of the 20th century and a lightning rod for conspiracy theorists everywhere. The Warring Commission, the committee assembled to investigate the JFK assassination, described Oswald as profoundly alienated from the world in which he lived. Oswald had a tumultuous childhood. His father died two months before he was born, and his mother placed him in an orphanage when he was just three years old. He attended 12 different schools as a child, eventually joining the Marines when he was 17. Paradoxically, around this time, he also developed an interest in communism and the writings of Karl Marx. He eventually moved to the Soviet Union, finding himself in the unusual position of being an American expat living in Minsk during the height of the Cold War. After moving back to the United States, spending time in Dallas and then New Orleans, he became even more isolated, and his complicated and contradictory political beliefs turned violent. At the mere age of 24, he was arrested for killing JFK. Just two days later, as he was being transferred from the city jail to the county jail, a man named Jack Ruby shot him in the stomach. On live tv, Oswald died in the ambulance on the way to Parkland Memorial Hospital, the same hospital where JFK was pronounced dead two days earlier. Today, to unpack Oswald's life and legacy, we are joined by Peter Savotnik. Peter, senior editor at the Free Press and author of the book the Interloper, Lee Harvey Inside of the Soviet Union. Peter, thank you for joining us.
- [02:00]
Peter Savotnik
Great to be here.
- [02:01]
George Severis
So I want to get into Lee's early childhood and how he got to be this kind of infamous figure. So before we get into the specifics, tell me a little bit about Lee Harvey Oswald's childhood.
- [02:14]
Peter Savotnik
It's a childhood that's characterized by constant instability movement. So all the core constituents that go into a happy, healthy childhood were mostly, if not entirely absent. A reliable mother, reliable father, a single place where you might live, a single school, or maybe one or two or three schools over the many years that you attend. A community, friends, all the things that make up a normal upbringing and that provide kids with a sense of place in the world. That's all absent in his case. And so there's this bouncing around from Texas to Louisiana. They go up to New York for a little while. They come back and there is this rhythm that emerges. Every year and a half, there's like a major rupture and everything's uprooted. This is all because of his mother, I should add, Marguerite, who is not well. And usually it's because of some kind of romantic trouble or work trouble. And they're always scrambling for money. And so everything is uprooted and they go. Then they settle down. And this time he's told everything's going to be better and it's going to be calm and good. And of course, that never happens because his mother is the same person always. The only person in his life who provides some semblance of normalcy or stability is his older brother. But he's a good bit older and he's really on his own. And so it's a lonely, sad, peripatetic kind of lifestyle that unlikely to lead anything good or productive.
- [03:57]
George Severis
His father passes away a few months before he's born. Right?
- [04:00]
Peter Savotnik
Right.
- [04:01]
George Severis
And then his mom ends up sending both his older brothers to an orphanage and then eventually him. But he's also in and out. I was unclear as to whether he was living full time at the orphanage or he was also living with his mother.
- [04:15]
Peter Savotnik
I think it's sort of a little bit ill defined for a bit. You know, you have the one through line in his life is people, organizations, kind of filling in the gaps when his mother simply couldn't pull it together. The orphanage plays that. But I think it's the same pattern always, which is the normal things that we expect a mother or a father to do can't be expected to be provided for. And so here is this constant casting about, this scrambling and this looking and wondering about where am I? Who am I? Where do I go next? And there's a kind of fear and a kind of an angstiness about Oswald that you can sense is developing by the time he's in his early teens.
- [05:00]
George Severis
Right. And so speaking of that, he's in his teens in New York and he's sort of ostracized at school. Everyone sees him as kind of odd. This is around when he's starting to get interested in politics and Marxist politics specifically. So what is that like as a teen? How does he get politicized?
- [05:17]
Peter Savotnik
You know, it is a little bit tricky to answer because Oswald attempted to impose some kind of order on his own thinking, his own evolution later when he was in the Soviet Union and then actually after he left. So he's viewing himself through the prism of the previous five to 10 years and he's doing so with a very, very limited understanding of the ideas, politics, geopolitics that he's immersed in, and with a very, very limited understanding of himself. So the way he tells it is he leaves high school, he joins the Marines early, and he's initially very excited about being a part of the Marines. That is not so surprising. The father figure that is the military imposing order on his life. But it turns out that that's hard too, because there are expectations baked into that agreement, that obligation you have to get up at a certain time, you have to adhere to a certain code of conduct, you have to respect your superior officers. All the things that go into making a large organization like the Marines work with the punctilious nature of any serious military organization. So it's very exacting. And he just doesn't have the wherewithal, the determination, the clarity of purpose to see it through. I think had he been smarter, had he had somebody in his life who had said to him, look, just get through this chapter in your life, complete this one thing, and it will give you an enormous sense of confidence. It will be a boost that will set you on a different course that might have led to a different outcome. But there was no one like that in his life. And so the same pattern adheres while he's in Japan based with the Marines overseas, that he starts to get into a lot of trouble, and then inevitably he finds other outlets. The way he describes is he comes into contact with ideas emanating from the Soviet and Communist worlds, and he's fascinated by that. And in a way, they offer the same thing that the Marines offered. It was this very deadly serious mission. It was very kind of manly. It was tough, it was strong, but it was just new. And it was something he hadn't yet messed up. And so he could begin to fantasize about going to the Soviet Union and recreating himself there in the way that he had hoped to have recreated himself in the Marines. And that's, of course, what he ultimately attempts to do.
- [07:50]
George Severis
One of the very obvious contradictions here with his ideology, which I'm sure is due to the fact that he is largely self educated and also just incredibly young. I mean, he's 17 when he joins the Marines is this contradiction between his espoused Communist Marxist views and his desire to be in the Marines, which you would think are two opposite instincts. And he doesn't necessarily abandon one for the other. In fact, when he's in the Marines, he famously is reading Marx and talking to those around him about Marxist philosophy and communism. So how did his superiors even allow that to continue as long as it did? And how does he reconcile those beliefs.
- [08:31]
Peter Savotnik
In his own head among people in his immediate orbit? There was an awareness that Oswald was into communism and they would poke fun at him. There was some name calling, but he was a grunt. Ultimately, you're free to read what you want to read. You can say what you want to say as long as you play by the rules. Okay, you're entitled to believe crazy ideas. That was, I think the attitude that the Marines had. The problem is that as he became more serious about his Marxism and again, it's important to understand, as you know, he's self educated and I think that's a very generous way of putting it. You know, he had these very kind of fragmented, distorted, stereotypical kind of notions or cartoonish ideas about the Soviet Union and communism. His understanding of history is very, very porous. So all this winds up getting kind of retrofitted into, you know, this picture, this scenario that he's painting for himself and he's imagining himself in and going to and joining and being a. And so I think there's this gels in his head and he becomes more serious about and he begins to think about how this actually might unfold concretely. Then it becomes harder and harder for him to be a good Marine. And ultimately he applies to get discharged early, just like he left to join the marines early. And he's allowed to do so, not by a lot, but it's sort of symbolic in a way. He's so eager to leave, he's so eager to jump to his next phase, to escape to that, that he has to get out of wherever he is before he's actually supposed to get out.
- [10:09]
George Severis
We're going to take a short break. Stay with us.
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Peter Savotnik
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George Severis
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George Severis
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Peter Savotnik
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- [11:18]
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- [12:18]
Peter Savotnik
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George Severis
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George Severis
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- [12:56]
George Severis
And we're back with United States of Kennedy. There seems to be this pattern that he's always laser focused on a specific goal. And that interest lasts for maybe one to two years.
- [13:07]
Peter Savotnik
Correct.
- [13:08]
George Severis
And then he sort of moves on to the next thing. And I think that can be a political commitment. It can be an obsession with one specific figure. It can be an obsession with one specific location that he wants to move to because he feels like there would be a better life there. And again, something I kept going back to as I was reading about him is just like the JFK assassination happened when he was only 24. All of this is as he's basically, you know, what we would think of as college age, which is when people think of him as this mastermind or radicalized. You know, it's important to keep that in mind that he's like 18, 19, 20 years old. So he leaves the Marines. And then of course, and this is what your book is about is his time in the Soviet Union, which happens right after he leaves the Marines. So obviously for an American to, to manage being an expat over there at the time, in the peak of the Cold War was an incredibly strange thing. So what was the process like by which he went from being an ex Marine in the US to going to Moscow?
- [14:07]
Peter Savotnik
So you're absolutely right, it was very strange. What Oswald didn't appreciate is that the Soviets had seen this before many times. They'd been seeing it for decades. And he was by then a cliche. That the disaffected, alienated young American who is sort of ideologically excited, feverish and is lost at home, is a failure at home and thinks that in the Soviet Union he will recreate himself, he will become the man he's supposed to be. And so by the time he gets there, recall that it's the late 50s. Joseph Stalin has been dead at this point for six years. Nikita Khrushchev is the leader. They're unsurprised by Oswald. The only question that the KGB had for him or about him was, is he useful to us at all? Does he know anything? And Oswald seems to sense this or know this, and he makes a big point when he's interviewed by the KGB that he was at this base in Japan where there were the U2 spy planes. And as you may know, the U2 spy planes at the time were this top secret secret program that the Eisenhower administration had been running, capturing very sensitive information in the Soviet Union. We had denied that we were doing it. The Soviets knew that we were doing it, but publicly we denied that we were doing it. The problem from the Soviet vantage point was that they didn't have any missiles that were powerful enough to reach the spy planes. So you had all these spy planes that were flying at a very, very high altitude with very powerful cameras and the Soviets couldn't take them out. And so the question that the KGB had, it was very simple, was did Oswald know anything that would have helped them in any way build a missile or take down these spy planes? And it quickly became abundantly clear to them that he knew nothing. They knew more about the spy planes than he did. And so he's there for a grand total of six days when they tell him, you're gonna have to go. They don't want him there because he's a liability, he's unstable. They've seen this before. They know that he's not gonna be useful to them and he' just going to be a high visibility kind of problem. An American ex Marine in Moscow is a problem. And so what does Otipal do? Not surprisingly, he goes back to his hotel. He attempts to kill himself, but he does a very half hearted job and he sort of slits his wrists. He winds up at this hospital, I've been there, it's just north of the center of Moscow. He's treated and the Russians are kind of not sure what to do because he's attempted to kill himself. But in attempt that hard. And so the kgb, when they find him, he's been bleeding seriously, but he's not actually on the precipice of death. He's just, he needs to be seen by a doctor and patched up. But he's, you know, more predictable ways of killing oneself. And Oswald didn't avail himself of those ways. So anyway, he's treated and then he's told, okay, fine, you want to stay, you can stay. And then they do what they've done many times before with disaffected Westerners who have come to the Soviet Union hoping to recreate themselves. They send them to some boring, out of the way provincial town and they say, okay, you want the Soviet experience, We're going to give you the Soviet experience. And they send him to Minsk, which is the quintessential Soviet city in the sense that it had been utterly demolished during the war, during World War II. It was a disaster. I think more people were murdered in Minsk between the Nazis and the Soviets than possibly any other city in the Soviet Union. But it was an utterly just destroyed place. And at the time, remember, we're only 14 years removed from the end of the war, so it's still in the midst of rebuilding. Very much so. And they send him there and he's put up in this, actually by Soviet standards, in a very nice apartment. He has it to himself, which was very unusual. And he's given a job at a radio and television factory and he's now a member of the proletariat.
- [18:13]
George Severis
So you're saying that this is sort of a common archetype that the KGB was used to. At the same time, he is an oddity in the eyes of an average American. And I know that while he was in Minsk he gave interviews to journalists in the States that were doing stories about him. So just how common was it like were there? Was there, even if it was small, an expat quote unquote community there, or was it literally just one person here and there that had been placed by the KGB as a sort of oddity?
- [18:39]
Peter Savotnik
Yeah, so that's a good question, because it was very common in the immediate wake of the revolution for the intellectuals, the kind of celebrity thinkers and writers and artists to go to the Soviet Union. People like Bertrand Russell would go there and write glowingly about the new chapter in history that was being written, the erection of Homo Sovieticus and all this, you know, these grand philosophizing about the great accomplishment that was the Soviet Union. That begins to taper off in the 30s when the true nature of Stalinism, which should have been readily apparent, becomes unavoidably apparent. And then of course, there's the famines in Ukraine and mass death. There's the Great Terror, 1937, 1938. So by the time we get to the war, the Soviet Union has lost much of its luster among left wing intelligentsia. Not so much because they'd given up on radical leftism, or even Stalinism for that matter, but because it was sort of politically unfeasible. You couldn't really be viewed as being aligned with Joseph Stalin, even if you quietly thought that he was doing the right thing. And so then there's the war, and then there's this shift away toward looking for other causes, movements to support. There's the promise of Maoist China. And then of course, right around the time I should say that Oswald goes to the Soviet Union, there's the emergence of Castro and the promise of Cuba, which of course Oswald, after he goes back to the United States, will become involved in. But the point is that by the time Oswald got there, not only was he a cliche in the sense that the KGB was familiar with this type, but he was a cliche whose time had passed. So there's something doubly pathetic about the whole thing. Yes, a lot of people used to do what you are doing and no one's doing it anymore because they all know that this is a joke. And even the Soviets knew that. At the time he was there, I think there were only a handful of American expats who were living in the Soviet Union. I think it might have been no more than 10 or 15, I think at the most, scattered across the whole country.
- [20:43]
George Severis
So while he was in the Soviet Union, he in fact got married with a woman there, Marina Prusakova. They started a family together. Their relationship was, from what I understand, fraught. There was a lot of yelling. He had anger issues. I think, you know, he's this perpetual outsider. So I imagine there's also just a daily frustration with not having community and not being understood and trying to square his politics with his personal life and whatever else. And from what I understand, his life starts to devolve a bit in the Soviet Union. And that coincides with him becoming disillusioned with the politics that he thought he was moving there to embrace.
- [21:23]
Peter Savotnik
Yeah, I think that's right. Look, there's a pattern here. The Soviet Union, like the Marines, had a certain rhythm and a set of expectations and an unspoken code of conduct. In many ways, it was harder than the Marines because the rules were probably less transparent. You just had to kind of learn them. That was the role of social cues and just being attuned and empathetic and all that. And as always, Oswald has this impossible time adapting. So it's always that he's fascinated by the novelty of it all, and he loves that he's the new person and they're excited about him. And in the beginning, he has a hard time in his diary containing his excitement about all the girls who want to talk to him. He had not had much in the way a personal life ever, or a romantic life. And so this was all just very new and exciting to him. But then over time, as with the Marines, now you're here, you have a job, you have an apartment, you develop personal commitments and obligations, and you have to do certain things, and you have to be on time and do a good job and all those things. And he has an impossible time with that. And so I think with Rena, the really fascinating thing is that that xi. And generally speaking, the Soviet Union offered him, much like the Marines did, a very good alternative life. Had he stuck with the Marines, he would have had a possibly very, very meaningful, constructive life. Had he stuck with the Soviet Union, had he actually been able to carry through on his imaginings, he would have had a very comfortable life. He would have had this apartment, which by Soviet standards is very nice. He would have had a pension. He would have had decent healthcare. Again, by their standards, not by ours. He would have had a dach, probably. He would have had a network and friends. It would have actually been a not that bad way to go. If you're somebody who's a very, very mediocre intelligence with very few prospects back in the United States, it's not a bad thought. Like, okay, you're not going to do much with your life, probably, in America, so why not be a technician at this factory in Minsk where you're going to be taken care of, and you'll have this community and a nice wife, and he ultimately has two daughters. That would have been a very nice. Nice way for him to have gone about living. And he probably would have made it to about the 1990s, and that would have been it. But again, he can't see things to their natural end or their fruition. And so, yes, at a certain point, he just feels this again. It's the same uncontainable sort of need to get out. And as you probably know, he goes back to the U.S. embassy. He had gone there initially when he came to Moscow, and he had very proudly and defiantly thrown down his passport and said, you know, I'm done with this. And he told the Americans, you can throw this out. And the consular officer wisely kept his passport and said to himself what the KGB also knew, which is that you're not going to make it here as long as you think. And the kind of person who is driven to come here in the first place is the kind of person who's going to have an impossible time doing what I just mapped out, like actually building a life here. Eventually, he sheepishly goes back to the embassy in Moscow. He's able to engineer a return home to the United States. Then he starts making these kind of crazy requests that he asked the Navy to change his honorable discharge to a just discharge. The Navy of course, includes the Marines. So he. This was overseen by the Navy. They had made his honorable discharge discharge when they found out that he defected to the Soviet Union. And now he's requesting that they change it back to honorable discharge, which the Navy not unreasonably or surprisingly says no to. But ultimately he's able to go back to America.
- [25:01]
George Severis
It seems also to your earlier point about how he's not ever quite fitting in. He's specifically drawn to these collectivist communities, whether it's the Marines or the Soviet. I mean, I realize those are, you know, in many ways opposite, but these communities where the whole, you know, your self determination depends on being part of the collective rather than living in a sort of more individualistic environment. And so that really clashes with his more renegade instincts because he wants to always be breaking the rules in some way. And specifically in environments like this, that's the one thing you can't do. You have to abide by the rules. Okay, so he goes back to America. And Marina, from what I understand, really did not want to move back to America. So finally he convinces her they move to America. And where do they initially land?
- [25:48]
Peter Savotnik
They initially go to New York, but then they find their way to Dallas, where he's from. And it turns out that there's actually a rather sizable Russian expat community in Dallas. These are not Soviet emigres. These are people who come from the Russian emigre world. And so they are for the most part, very anti Soviet, anti Marxist. But he kind of insinuates himself into that community. And they take in both of them, especially Marina, because she can speak Russian, she's one of them. And he quickly finds himself on the periphery. And in a way, this is the hardest chapter of his life. The advantage of the previous chapters, the Marines and the Soviet Union, is that that they were very regimented and very clear expectations about what he had to do to get by from one day to the next. Now he really has to rebuild a life all by himself and he has to concoct out of nothing a future. And as you said, he kind of took to these large collectivist enterprises. He talked about being drawn to collectivism. I don't actually think that was it. I think it was more the maleness, the manliness of both these enterprises. It was the thing that's missing, right, always in his life, which is a man, the father figure. And it's sad, right, because he's so obviously looking for structure and that kind of brick wall who's meant to hem in all of your kind of worse impulses, all the things that kind of lead young men astray. He's always looking for that kind of structure and he wants it, but he doesn't know how to live in that world. So this thing that he craves is this one thing that he can't actually. He doesn't know how to make sense of it or coexist with it. And so he comes back to the United States, to Texas, and he's really lost. And that's clear almost from the beginning. And that's how he fall into Cuba activism stuff, the Castro stuff. And it's what leads to this very kind of frenetic bouncing around. There's essentially no stability or happiness at home with Reena. There's nothing about their life there that sounds all that happy or meaningful. It doesn't feel very constructive, as if there's much of a future in mind. Right.
- [27:55]
George Severis
And this is also, from what I understand, when his introduction to political violence happens, the possibility of violence more clearly becomes apparent. So for those who might not know, JFK was not the first assassination attempt while he was in Dallas. I believe he planned to and failed to assassinate a different American politician, which is General Edwin Walker, who was a rising right wing figure around that time. Can you tell us just a little bit about him and what kind of prompted the obsession?
- [28:28]
Peter Savotnik
Yeah, well, you know, it's unclear exactly what prompted the obsession because he doesn't talk about this much he wrote a few things here and there, but you're working with very little. And certainly with Oswald, there's not much in the way, there's almost zero introspection. So in all the things he writes down, his kind of ramblings, he does what very average people without any kind of insight into themselves tend to do, which is he tends to abstract and talks about these kind of grand processes and America and the Soviet Union and Marxism and militarism, but without really understanding at all what's driving him, why he is so compelled by these various angers, these furies that shouldn't really animate him that much. Without thinking about the practical or concrete implications of what he thinking about or doing. He actually sounds a lot like a lot of college students today. But there's a kind of impracticality in this sort of hyperventilating and this proto activism that doesn't really have much in the way of shape or definition with regard to the general. He tries to kill him, he fails, he escapes, or they don't really come close to finding him. It's not clear who's responsible or at least he's not implicated as far as I know. And that comes shortly before the Kennedy assassination.
- [29:50]
George Severis
Right. And there would seem to be a contradiction there because this General Walker was staunchly anti Kennedy and was this sort of like right wing anti communist figure. So if, if anything, it would make more sense for that to be a huge villain for Oswald.
- [30:06]
Peter Savotnik
Oh, as opposed to like the Democrat, Kennedy? Yes.
- [30:08]
George Severis
I mean, obviously it's more complicated than that, but it seems like this guy is a more natural enemy, I guess, is what I'm saying.
- [30:14]
Peter Savotnik
I think that's a distinction that would have been lost on Oswald. I think he probably viewed the General much the way he viewed the President through this antifa sort of lens.
- [30:23]
George Severis
I see.
- [30:25]
Peter Savotnik
Look, these are all part of the American imperial power structure. Does it really matter, like some party designation? It doesn't. They're all war criminals, they're all villains. They're all kind of this kind of monochromatic brushstroke approach to American political life.
- [30:39]
George Severis
We'll be back with more United States of Kennedy after this break.
- [30:48]
Peter Savotnik
For over 50 years they redefined rock the spirit lives on Monday Warrior Me.
- [30:54]
George Severis
Me Stride Today's come saw your Me me Pride Getty Lee and Alex lyson rush live 50 something tour. Sign up for free sale access at Ticketmaster.
- [31:13]
Peter Savotnik
Legends don't stop, they evolve. Rush, if you're waiting for your AI to turn into ROI and wondering how long you have to wait? Maybe you need to do more than wait. Any business can use AI. IBM helps you use AI to change how you do business.
- [31:39]
George Severis
Business.
- [31:41]
Peter Savotnik
Let's create smarter business IBM.
- [31:47]
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- [32:48]
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- [33:57]
George Severis
And we're back with United States of Kennedy. And to your point about the lack of introspection, from what I understand, his diary, which he called the historic diary. Is that right?
- [34:07]
Peter Savotnik
Yeah, that's Right.
- [34:07]
George Severis
There's a sense of remove. He thinks of himself as like a big thinker that is able to think in broad strokes about large power structures without necessarily placing himself within them. And maybe I'm wrong, but does it come from a personal stake of I am part of the proletariat and I am fighting against? I think it's a bit more like he's a political commentator commenting at a remove or something.
- [34:31]
Peter Savotnik
It's more that there's no really kind way to put this. It's stupid, it's ignorant, it's utterly devoid of any kind of intellectual depth, for sure. But just as important, there's no insight into himself, there's no awareness of, you know, why do these things make me feel the way they do do? It's a good question, right? Like why do certain political opinions or ideas, words, statements, books, whatever, evoke such strong feelings in me? And how do I respond to those feelings? How do I act on them? What's the best way to do that? If you like something, you might talk about these things, you might share these ideas. If you don't like them, conversely, you might say why you don't like them. But of course, it's meant to be civilized and there's meant to be a discourse and a conversation and he's incapable of all of that. And really there is with Oswald, like a very. He's a very, very, very limited vernacular when it comes to just, you know, being able to communicate any kind of ideas or anything like that. And so, yes, there's this sort of silly abstraction that takes place constantly with him. I think that that's what you're talking about. Like the historic diary is just this sort of like, yes, I'm commenting on not just the world, but history with a capital H in these grand Hegelian terms and kind of framings and. And that's risable.
- [35:50]
George Severis
Yeah, which is another part of the male sort of energy of this whole thing. It's very like, you know, guy in college that loves reading political biographies of great men or something.
- [36:00]
Peter Savotnik
No, no, that's right. Every disaffected 18 year old who's been exposed to Nietzsche for a week, he's had a lecture or two, or read a fragment of Thus Spoke Gara Sustra and has decided now that he's going to emulate the Nietzschean style, or he's going to writing in these kind of big German, either idealistic or philosophical terms. It's laughable. These philosophers had enormous quantities of education behind them. They might be dead wrong about all kinds of things. But they didn't actually just write from a position of ignorance. And what Oswald does, which is much like, I think, the disaffected 18 year old who hopefully kind of grows out of this after his second or third week in class, what he does is he just emulates. And there's lots of sort of, of grandiosity and silliness that I think it became clear after the assassination when they reviewed all of his writings and ramblings were not the work of a serious man. Right.
- [37:01]
George Severis
It's also he is obviously isolated and not in a college environment where he can bounce ideas off of people and be in a discussion based seminar where he's saying something but then being questioned either by a professor based. I mean, it is a classic lone wolf type thing. So after the botched assassination attempt, his life with Marina is not going well. He's sort of at another low point. They end up moving to New Orleans. And the missing link with all his various dalliances with Marxism and communism at the time is of course, Cuba and Castro in Cuba. And so when he goes to New Orleans, there's a big Cuban community there. There is obviously a lot of anger at Castro, but then there's an equal amount of anger at, you know, jfk. This is right after Bay of Pigs. There's a lot of like political activity happening around anti Castro sentiment. And this is in classic Oswald fashion, an environment that inspires him to get involved and create even more political agitation. So what are his surroundings like and how does he sort of fit into them? And I should say that another reason why this is an especially interesting part of the story is because so much of the conspiracy thinking around the JFK assassination has to do with his era living in New Orleans and with his various connections to either, depending on who you ask, pro Castro or anti Castro groups. I mean, we watch for this podcast, we watched the Oliver Stone JFK film.
- [38:33]
Peter Savotnik
The worst thing ever made about this as an issue.
- [38:35]
George Severis
I mean, it's very tough because it's such a great movie just in turn, like on a technical level, but it makes you feel absolutely insane after you're done watching it. All of this is to say, apologies to Oliver Stone, but what actually happened during the New Orleans years?
- [38:49]
Peter Savotnik
I think what a lot of people do, this includes Oliver Stone, is they lose themselves in the details and they lose sight of the bigger picture and what's actually happening here. They remind me a great deal of the conspiracy theorists I used to run into at the National Archives when I came back from the former Soviet Union, I should say. In Minsk, when I was researching Oswald's story. And I came back and I was doing a lot of archival research in the National Archives just outside DC and you go there and there are always these guys who are kind of aging, usually aging boomers, and they've got glasses low and they've got these big reams of books and then the highlighters, and they're circling every so often. Gas. Aha. As if they've just unlocked the key to the deep state. And there are all kinds of problems with their ratiocination, you might say. The number one thing is they immerse themselves in the minutia and they think that they're proving something, that they've got the goods, and in so doing, they lose sight of what's actually happening. So why did he go to New Orleans? He knew Louisiana. He had spent half his childhood in Louisiana. Why did he get involved in the Castro Cuba? Because he had just come back from the Soviet Union and it was adjacent to where he had been. He was not recruited, he was not especially successful in doing pro Castro work in New Orleans. It was just another cause to latch onto. It's something to be a part of. He's always looking for things to latch onto. My book is called the Interloper. He's trying to break into spaces that he's not. Not suited for, that he doesn't know how to be a part of or adapt to. And so this becomes his last effort. He recognizes that, which is why he ultimately goes just shortly before the assassination. Right. There's this last ditch effort. He realizes on some level he's got to go back to the Soviet Union. This is a huge mistake. So what does he do? He goes to Mexico with the hope that that's going to lead him to Cuba, with the ultimate expectation that that will lead him back to Moscow or to the Soviet Union. And of course, the Cubans, the Soviets are saying to themselves and to him, we're done with you. And so he winds up being forced to go back to the United States. And now it's like the scene in Star wars where they're in the trash compactor and the walls are kind of, you know, closing in and he's kind of bouncing back and forth and the oxygen is disappearing. And there's a desperation. You can feel it mounting in sort of his movements and his ramblings and his conversations, his interactions with Marina and other people in the Russian expat community. And so the assassination, viewed through that lens, is just this Kind of explosive sort of need to extricate himself from himself. I mean, it's suicidal on some level, I don't know that he thought through things to that degree. I don't know that he actually expected that he would be detained and then he would be shot by Jack Ruby or some other very angry Kennedy supporter. But on some level he must have understood that if you kill an American President, your life as you've known it is over. And this is true if you kill anyone, but especially if you kill an American president. And I think that's what he wanted.
- [41:47]
George Severis
It was an act of self destruction in some way.
- [41:50]
Peter Savotnik
Absolutely. And of course it has to have this homicidal rage baked into it because there is a lot of rage directed at the whole world because really like the subtext of all this is why can I not fucking fit in? Why is it that everywhere I go, I fail? Everywhere I go I am an outsider. I'm always an interloper, I'm always the guy who's breaking in. I'm never the person who just joins, adapts and becomes. And the realization, I think that's percolating, that's building up in his head over these many years is because you don't have the equipment, the sort of psychic infrastructure to do this. You don't know how to do this. So the assassination is really this sort of homicidal suicidal explosion that amounts to a great escape from a very, very unhappy life.
- [42:34]
George Severis
We'll be back with more United States of Kennedy after this break. For over 50 years they redefined rock.
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- [45:53]
George Severis
And we're back with United States of Kennedy. I mean it's interesting you say that there's a lamenting of not fitting in because in fact his behavior is not of someone who is trying to fit in. I mean just looking at his time in New Orleans, as I said, there was a lot of anti Castro sentiment and organizing, whatever and his response to that is going out and passing around pro Castro flyers one of the most fringe things you could be doing at that time.
- [46:17]
Peter Savotnik
I think that by that point he was spiraling rapidly. But if you go back to Oswald's time in Minsk, there's a for him a rather long period in there, about a year where he really begins to immerse himself in the very best that Minsk has to offer for someone of his education and background. And I spent a lot of time when I was researching the book and he figures prominently in the book with his close friend Ernst Stobitz, who almost certainly was forming on him, was probably a. I'm guessing I couldn't pinpoint this, but I, I'm pretty sure it was a KGB asset who was, you know, strategically planted to collect information. They were all collecting information on him, but I think the Tobit was one of their most valuable assets. Possibly Marina as well. But he wanted to. It's clear from his interactions, from the, the parties he attended and the, the dinners he attended and the life he found himself in, there's this clear desire to be a part of this world. That's why I focus on the Soviet period, because I think it's where he really tried and really came closest to transcending himself to adapting and to building something. But he fails. And that failure, I think is truly devastating to Oswald. He doesn't recognize it. He doesn't have the capacity to see what that means. But it's a profound failure because what it really means is that you're always going to be an interloper. You're always going to be a failure, like a deeply failed man. And I think that's how I would view then the chapter in New Orleans, which by that point just this kind of desperate, very end of his life. Again, casting about, trying to find some latch, like grasping for something to escape yourself.
- [48:00]
George Severis
Yeah, I'm conscious of time and I want to get to the post assassination chapter of all of this, which is what most people know about him. He assassinates jfk, if you believe the official narrative. And if you're not Oliver Stone, then he is immediately killed as he's being transferred to a different facility by Jack Rudy Ruby. I want to at least spend a little time talking about the various conspiracies surrounding him. To me the two most repeated themes are either some sort of collusion with the CIA or some sort of collusion with organized crime. What was the status of those two theories? I mean, what are the big like smoking guns that people saw, that they became fascinated with and led them down these rabbits holes?
- [48:43]
Peter Savotnik
Well, there are the things that people talk about a lot. The grassy knoll and the. There's been lots of discussion about the physics of the bullet, especially the second bullet and the Bruder tape. And the thing is that there are, I think, I forget, I think it's 6 or 7 million documents in the Kenning assassination archive. You can extract from the archive any theory you want. You can piece together any catenation of data points to construct whatever evil plan, plot, whatever story you want to imagine. I think that, as always, the question is why do people feel compelled to do so? Why do they feel as if they have to find the reason behind the reason when it's so obvious that it is Oswald? Yes, there were confusions about this shooting. There are always confusions. There were sloppinesses or mistakes made by the Warren Commission. There always are. And I think in the case of the Warren Commission, they made some serious mistakes. But we ignore Occam's Razor, right? The simplest explanation is the likeliest. And there's very, very little reason to think that Oswald is not simply the lone gunman who killed jfk. And what I find more troubling is that so many Americans, and of course, this has become more of a problem in recent years, feel compelled to believe that he could not have acted alone or that it was not him or that this is all just part of a big ruse and that we're all being duped, we're all being manipulated by secret, clandestine powers. These are all just unverifiable statements that no one can disprove but no one can prove.
- [50:25]
George Severis
So I was watching the PBS Frontline from many years ago about Lee Harvey Oswald and one of the first talking heads, and I wish I remembered who it was, describes him as that famous Churchill quote, a mystery shrouded in an enigma, wrapped in a puzzle.
- [50:39]
Peter Savotnik
And.
- [50:39]
George Severis
And I think your book goes a long ways into demystifying him. But I'm wondering, are there still mysteries or unknown elements that to this day you're like, God, I wish I had that piece of the puzzle?
- [50:51]
Peter Savotnik
No, I mean, look, it would be great if there were any kind of record of his thoughts about American politics, to say nothing of John F. Kennedy or White House policy. But that's a whole level of sophistication that was completely missing from his.
- [51:09]
George Severis
Yeah, so there isn't. I mean, in terms of jfk, like, just at the most basic level, he never expressed an opinion about jfk.
- [51:17]
Peter Savotnik
No. In fact, the little we have, according to Trowicz, he said one or two things that were praiseworthy of Kennedy. I think he probably viewed Kennedy as part of this American imperial blob and party affiliation policy. This is all silly stuff for people who tell themselves lies about the American hegemon. This is stupid again, it's sort of like antifa thinking. This is not sophisticated. It's not nuanced. There's no ability to distinguish or make thoughtful distinctions between what one person says or believes and another. And policy distinctions. There's just assumption about the inherent and obvious unmistakable evil of America. All right, well, I don't really know what to do with that because it's not as if this hatred resides atop a deep understanding of American history, America's.
- [52:10]
Commercial Voice
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- [52:11]
Peter Savotnik
None of that. It's so obviously personal mission, so obviously meant to compensate for all the many things missing in his life, starting with a father and then immediately followed by a reliable mother. And you know, the very sad fact of the matter is nothing was ever going to make up for that. Nothing was going to be able to help Oswald dig his way out of a hole. And so I think you're left with this very sad, angry, rudderless man who is consumed much in the way that we see today with many people online, consumed by these imaginings and rages and furies that are profoundly ill informed or ignorant, but are meant to compensate for or make up for the gargantuan hole in his soul.
- [53:00]
George Severis
All right, so maybe, maybe less Marx and more Freud would have benefited him.
- [53:05]
Peter Savotnik
At the end or just like a few novels.
- [53:07]
George Severis
But yeah. Peter, thank you so much. This was incredibly informative and very helpful. Thank you so much for taking the time.
- [53:13]
Peter Savotnik
Thank you.
- [53:15]
George Severis
So that's it for this week's episode. United States of Kennedy is hosted by me, George Severis. Original music by Joshua Topolsky, production help by Carmen Lorenz. Our executive producer is Jenna Cagle. Research by Dave Ruse and Austin Thompson, edited by Graham Gibson and mixed by Doug Bain. United United States of Kennedy is a production of iHeart podcasts. Subscribe and follow United States of Kennedy for all things Kennedy each week.
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Peter Savotnik
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George Severis
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George Severis
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