Lee Harvey Oswald
American former marine who assassinated John F. Kennedy (1939–1963)
Lee Harvey Oswald (October 18, 1939 – November 24, 1963) was a U.S. Marine veteran, who assassinated John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, on November 22, 1963.
Oswald was placed in juvenile detention at age twelve for truancy, during which he was assessed by a psychiatrist as "emotionally disturbed" because of the lack of normal family life. He attended twelve schools in his youth, quitting repeatedly, and at age seventeen he joined the Marines, where he was court-martialed twice and jailed. He also became interested in Marxism from a young age. In 1959, he was discharged from active duty into the Marine Corps Reserve, then flew to Europe and defected to the Soviet Union. He lived in Minsk, married a Russian woman named Marina, and had a daughter. In June 1962, he returned to the United States with his wife, and eventually settled in Dallas, Texas, where their second daughter was born. Oswald still continued to express support for the Soviet Union and Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
Oswald shot and killed Kennedy on November 22, 1963, from a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository as Kennedy traveled by motorcade through Dealey Plaza in Dallas. About 45 minutes after shooting Kennedy, Oswald murdered a Dallas police officer, J. D. Tippit, on a suburban street.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q48745. VIAF identifies the subject as 77108416. The Library of Congress control number is n50049686. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1939, 1963, 1959 and 1962.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lee Harvey Oswald” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.