The Gunman and His Mother: Lee Harvey Oswald, Marguerite Oswald, and the Making of an Assassin (Kindle Single)

For most of us, the story of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy depicts Lee Harvey Oswald as a convenient cliche or a conspiracy puppet, Lone Gunman or Framed Patsy. Lost among the competing theories of villainy and cover-up is the real Lee Harvey Oswald, a troubled young man from a fractured family, a lonely child born without a future.

In this original and dramatic work, Steven Beschloss draws on a rich but relatively unmined public record, key interviews with Marguerite and other family members, and Lee's own writing and statements to trace the origin of an American tragedy.

He was a quiet boy who loved to stare at the stars. She was a bossy woman who always felt broke. He loved to ride the subways, skip school, go to the zoo. She was desperate and itinerant, forced to put her three kids into a New Orleans orphanage. He was a heavy reader, a homebody; she an oppressive and volatile figure. Both felt the world owed them better, and both carried a grudge that never softened. He was Lee Harvey Oswald and she his mother Marguerite.

The Gunman and His Mother depicts the troubled bond between a mother and her son, revealing in detail a relationship that has deserved focused treatment for a half century but has yet to receive it: how an innocent young boy evolved into a killer despite the watching eyes of his mother, his family, and his friends.


SNAPSHOTS
The Missed Opportunity: When Lee Harvey Oswald was 13 years old and living in New York, he was taken into custody for chronic truancy (he had skipped 48 of 64 school days) and placed in Youth House for examination. What the mental health professionals found was an emotionally disturbed child in serious need of treatment. The chief psychiatrist summed it up succinctly: "Lee has to be seen as an emotionally quite-disturbed youngster who suffers under the impact of really existing emotional isolation and deprivation, lack of affection, absence of family life and rejection by a self-involved and conflicted mother." Yet Marguerite Oswald, Lee's mother, did not take the findings of the various mental health professionals seriously. She was determined to avoid the growing pressure for Lee--and her--to get psychotherapeutic treatment. Instead, she left New York and returned to New Orleans, ensuring that this troubled boy never got the help he needed.

Why Lee went to Russia: When 20-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald defected to the Soviet Union, he said it was because of his attraction to Communism, his belief in Marxist economic theories, his desire to escape the downside of capitalist society, including poverty and racism. But the journey to Russia that began in October 1959 and ended in June 1962 was about more than ideology: Oswald was looking to escape a lifetime of instability. The attempted defection was a desperate attempt to form an identity independent from his mother.

Marguerite Goes to Washington: The U.S. State Department knew about Lee Harvey Oswald's mother before the assassination in 1963. Nearly three years earlier, Marguerite Oswald went to Washington with the intent of talking to the President herself. She wanted to find out what happened to her son who had defected to the Soviet Union -- and she was heading to the top for answers. She never spoke to the President, but she did speak to officials in the State Department. Within a few months, she not only learned her boy was alive and living in Minsk, he was struggling to find a way back home. It would take another 15 months before Lee Harvey could secure the necessary documents to return to America.