Book Review: The Interloper: Lee Harvey Oswald Inside the Soviet Union, by Peter Savodnik (2012)

Cover of The Interloper, by Peter Savodnik, 2012. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, November 22, 1963.

Reporter and author Peter Savodnik.

Last November 22nd was the 60th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. John F. Kennedy is someone who has long occupied a rarified position in my own life. I was born 17 years after Kennedy’s assassination, but his legacy has always felt quite present to me. (It probably helped that I was a history nerd who was obsessed with U.S. presidents when I was young.) My position is by no means unique: millions of Americans of all ages have admired John F. Kennedy, both during his lifetime and since his death. Kennedy is a figure who has resonated deeply with my own family history. Both of my parents were raised in Democratic, Catholic households. John F. Kennedy was a revered figure for my grandparents. My Mom’s parents had a framed picture of JFK displayed in their living room.  

For my parents, who were born in 1941 and 1945, Kennedy represented hope and promise. My Mom met Kennedy on October 2, 1960. She and a friend ran after JFK’s limo during a motorcade in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and the limo stopped and they shook hands with the Senator, then the Democratic nominee for President. My Dad never met JFK, but he wrote a moving essay about his sadness on November 22, 1963.  

This fall, I was reading an article about the new book by former Secret Service agent Paul Landis, who was part of President Kennedy’s security detail that fateful day in Dallas. In the article, Landis claimed that he stayed up until 5AM the night before the motorcade, but he wasn’t drunk. That seems unlikely to me, and it begs the follow up question, “So, does that mean you were high on cocaine, or were you with a woman?” Those would seem to me to be the 3 most likely reasons you’re still up at 5AM. But I digress. Reading that article didn’t make me want to read Landis’ book, but I decided I needed to read more about Lee Harvey Oswald. I pulled out my copy of Peter Savodnik’s 2012 book The Interloper: Lee Harvey Oswald Inside the Soviet Union.  

Lee Harvey Oswald defected to the Soviet Union in October of 1959 and subsequently returned to the United States in June of 1962. Conspiracy theorists have made much of Oswald’s defection and return to the US, putting forth theories that he was programmed by the KGB to assassinate Kennedy, or that he was a CIA agent pretending to be programmed by the KGB. Savodnik easily dismisses much of the conspiracy theories, writing “perhaps the most compelling argument against the claim that Oswald was recruited by an intelligence agency so that he might wreak havoc in the United States is Oswald himself...he could hardly have been counted on to do or finish anything. That a professional, clandestine organization would rely on Oswald to pull off what would have been one of the most dangerous operations ever—the assassination of an American president—is absurd.” (p.33) Exactly.  

Savodnik focuses his book on Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union, which is usually overlooked by historians. Oswald managed to stay in the Soviet Union because he attempted suicide when his request for Soviet citizenship was turned down. The KGB then made Oswald wait while they decided what to do with him. When Oswald still wanted to defect, they grudgingly let him in. The KGB had quickly ascertained that Oswald, despite his service in the US Marine Corps, had little to no intelligence value to them. Nevertheless, the KGB kept him under strict surveillance during his entire time in the Soviet Union.  

Oswald was a Marxist who fully expected the Soviet Union to be the glorious worker’s paradise that Vladimir Lenin had promised. As Savodnik writes, “He was unknowingly wading into a country that was not the place he expected it to be. He was an outsider still, but he did not know it.” (p.54) Oswald was shocked that the glorious worker’s revolution had been corrupted by Stalin, and he was disheartened by what he found in the Soviet Union. The Soviet government sent Oswald to Minsk, far away from the corridors of power, and where they thought he wouldn’t cause much trouble. Oswald was given a job at an electronics factory, and duly installed in an apartment.  

Savodnik tracked down Russians who knew Oswald, and what their impressions were of him. Many of Oswald’s co-workers and acquaintances were helpfully keeping the KGB informed about Oswald’s thoughts and habits. Oswald soon tired of life in Minsk in his bugged apartment, and by late 1961 he was actively attempting to return to the United States.  

Savodnik reminds the reader that Lee Harvey Oswald was a man who was searching for somewhere he belonged. This was a man who had moved almost every year of his life, a man who dropped out of high school in order to enlist in the Marines. When Oswald didn’t find a home in the Marines, he defected to the Soviet Union. When he didn’t find a home in the Soviet Union, he returned to the United States. With each jarring move of his young life, Oswald’s disaffection and alienation increased.  

By the time Oswald returned to the US in June of 1962, he had a Russian wife, Marina, and a daughter, June. Oswald’s wandering ways continued: from June of 1962 to November of 1963, he lived at 9 different addresses. “He was unable, as always, to build a life anywhere...It did not matter whether he was living in a Marine Corps barracks in Japan, an apartment in Minsk, or a boarding house in Dallas. The problem was Oswald.” (p.190)  

Eventually Oswald’s fury at his thwarted destiny exploded in violence. In April of 1963, Oswald attempted to assassinate General Edwin Walker, who had become a darling of the far right because of his attempts to indoctrinate his troops against communism. (Walker subsequently resigned his Army commission in 1961, becoming the only US general to resign in the 20th century.) Oswald fired one bullet at Walker, who was sitting at his dining room table. The bullet hit the window frame, and Walker suffered only minor injuries on his arm. The crime remained unsolved until after Kennedy’s assassination.  

Chance and circumstance led Lee Harvey Oswald to apply for a job at the Texas School Book Depository. Oswald was hired in mid-October 1963. In the days before Kennedy’s trip to Texas, the route of his motorcade was published in several newspapers. The motorcade would pass through Dealey Plaza, which the Texas School Book Depository building overlooked. Chance and circumstance gave Lee Harvey Oswald the opportunity to assassinate the President.  

Could Oswald have even explained why he did it? I doubt it, and because it was such a senseless crime, of course no sense could be made of Oswald’s motive, whatever it might have been. Randomness scares people. That’s why conspiracies are appealing. If you believe in a conspiracy, then JFK’s death makes sense—it’s because Kennedy was going to withdraw troops from Vietnam, it’s because of Cuba, it’s because Kennedy wanted peace with the Russians, or whatever you might believe. We don’t want to think that John F. Kennedy died simply because a 24-year-old disaffected loner happened to be working at a building that happened to overlook the motorcade route. But I think that’s the more likely answer, rather than shadowy conspiracy theories.