The Lee Harvey Oswald Question

The sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository is now a museum. The window at the southeast corner, from which the Warren Commission concluded Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots at President Kennedy's motorcade, is preserved behind a glass partition exactly as it appeared in November of nineteen sixty-three: boxes stacked as they were, the sight line down Elm Street visible.

Oswald's biography resists easy narrative. He had been a United States Marine, defected to the Soviet Union in nineteen fifty-nine, returned to the United States in nineteen sixty-two with a Soviet wife, and was working at the School Book Depository, which he had been hired into weeks before the assassination, through a contact who was entirely unaware of the political world Oswald inhabited. He distributed pro-Castro leaflets in New Orleans. He had connections, documented and disputed, to both the political left and to figures associated with the anti-Castro exile community. His motivations, if the Warren Commission's conclusion that he acted alone is correct, have never been fully explained to the satisfaction of a significant portion of the historical and public audience.

He was arrested at the Texas Theatre in Oak Cliff at one fifty in the afternoon on November twenty-second, about eighty minutes after the shots in Dealey Plaza. Two days later, on November twenty-fourth at eleven twenty-one in the morning, Jack Ruby walked into the basement of the Dallas Police Department headquarters and shot him in front of a live television audience. Oswald died within hours.

The Sixth Floor Museum addresses the conspiracy theories and the Warren Commission's conclusions with measured scholarly care. The House Select Committee on Assassinations, reporting in nineteen seventy-nine, found that Kennedy was probably killed as the result of a conspiracy, while agreeing with the Commission that Oswald fired the shots. The question has not been settled to the satisfaction of historical consensus.

Sixty years of argument have not resolved it. The window is still there.