Oswald’s Politics

Making sense of Lee Harvey Oswald's politics is not easy and has understandably resulted in quite varied interpretations. In the aftermath of the assassination, the immediate reaction of many who knew him or knew about him was that Oswald could never have shot the president for political reasons. Oswald's Politics traces the political thought and behaviour of the historical Lee Harvey Oswald before the events of November 22, 1963. It presents an alternative explanatory model of Oswald to the psycho-historical one used by the Warren Commission and argues that his ideas and actions resulted more from environmental and intellectual influences than attitudinal factors. It examines the impact the political culture of the American South and events of the Cold War had on his outlook and places Oswald within the political world of the New Left. The book concludes with a discussion as to his possible involvement in the JFK assassination and motives, and provides a compendium of all his known political writings and other key documents. Such analysis is integral to any speculation about his possible guilt or innocence and the most important question of all, which the physical evidence is unlikely ever to answer: why was JFK killed?

Gary W. O’Brien was born in Toronto in 1951. He holds a PhD in political science from Carleton University (Canada) and has taught courses on the assassination of President Kennedy at Algonquin College, Ottawa, Ontario.