This worthless book was written by a man who didnt interview any of Lees friends, so far as can be ascertained, in the USSR, yet it supposed to be about Lee in the USSR. He didnt interview Marina Oswald, either, saying shes already said what she wants to say. The book purports to show that Lee Oswald was a mental case who couldnt get along with anybody in the USSR or anywhere else. When Lee Harvey Oswald went to the U.S.S.R. Journalist Peter Savodnik theorizes that Lee Harvey Oswald’s experience in the Soviet Union shaped his intention to shoot JFK Share on Facebook Reddit this! Peter Savodniks new book on Lee Harvey Oswalds time in the USSR is titled The Interloper. LANDON NORDEMAN / COURTESY BASIC BOOKS Peter Savodniks new book on Lee Harvey Oswalds time in the USSR is titled The Interloper. By: Jennifer Hunter The Reader, Published on Sun Nov 17 2013 It has been 50 years since U.S. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was fatally shot as he toured Dallas in an open-air limousine. Dozens of books are being released this fall in an effort to illuminate that tragic day on Nov. 22, 1963. Journalist Peter Savodnik has taken on a more investigative approach: He delves into the life of JFK’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, a young American who lived briefly in Russia before returning to Texas and killing the president. Savodnik’s book, The Interloper, Lee Harvey Oswald Inside the Soviet Union, offers morsels of Oswald’s thinking, through badly spelled letters he wrote to his older brothers and diary entries. Savodnik offers previously unknown details of Oswald’s life, gleaned through interviews with his Soviet co-workers and friends. The Star’s conversation with Savodnik has been edited for length. Your thesis is that Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union, from October 1959 to June 1962, shaped his criminality, and helped to ensure his self-creation as an assassin. Oswald had a peripatetic childhood — by the time he was 17 he’d moved 20 times — and he had a difficult mother. Isn’t this really what marked his criminal intent, long before the flight to the Soviet Union? Oswald could never fit in or find a home for himself because he didn’t have the cognitive ability or the resources to do so. His life can be defined by a series of trespasses or interlopings — trespassing into new places with the hope of settling down, of finding some semblance of rootedness. The Soviet period exemplifies that better than any other period in his life. With each failure, with each failed attempt to settle in somewhere, his rage, his sense of alienation ratcheted up. The violent impulse morphed from a suicidal impulse to a homicidal one and at the same time Oswald imagined himself being a much more important person than he was. He not only wanted to escape his life that he had been confined to but he also wanted to elevate himself to some kind of world historical status. Tragically he succeeded. So many criminals have these scattered childhoods, come from fatherless homes. But Oswald did have brothers. There were people in his life, including one of the men his mother married, who could have provided some kind of anchor for him, given him roots. The reason he enlisted in the Marines, for example, was that his older brother and half-brother had served. They were guideposts. But what was firmly lacking in Oswald’s life was a father figure who could teach him how to adapt to difficult circumstances. If one’s mother is the source of boundless love, the father is supposed to provide a brick wall, a kind of instruction: ‘If you screw up, you have to get up and keep trying.’ When Oswald confronted obstacles. he didn’t know how to do that. He constantly fled from wherever he lived. When I read about Oswald being only 20 when he moved to the U.S.S.R. I was flabbergasted. Twenty-year-olds are really dumb (psychologically). They don’t have the wisdom to make such dramatic life changes. I think that he was looking for escape, for adventure, for something that would be bold and representative a break from the past. The flight to the Soviet Union has everything to do with where Oswald came from. There is nowhere in the world in October 1959 that is more at odds with the whole idea and metaphysics of Texas than Moscow. Oswald, in defecting to the Soviet Union, was looking for a re-creation, a rebirth. When I describe him as an interloper what I mean is that he was attempting to break into a world that he was not a part of, that he knew nothing about. Your main thesis is that Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union really shaped his sociopathic impulses, ones that culminated in the shooting of JFK. I don’t think at first Oswald had any intention at all to leave the Soviet Union. His diaries made it clear he wanted to stay in the Soviet Union forever but he didn’t really know what that would entail. It would have been very hard in any new life. It would have required a great deal of adaptation and work. This was especially the case in the Soviet Union. [Oswald could never properly speak Russian, nor did he know much about the country.] He became aware, over the two and a half years he was there, that living there wouldn’t work. When he comes home to the United States he is deeply dispirited. He’s probably depressed. I don’t think there was any intention formed in Minsk having to do with Kennedy or the United States or political assassination. I think he was deeply distraught and helpless when he returned. There was a latent violence that may have been awakened. Do you think he had a definable mental illness? I think he was alienated from mainstream American society. The difference between him and others alienated from America is that he responded to that with great violence, and his violence was targeted against the most important and powerful person in the world. Violent impulse lurked in Oswald for a long time. He lashed out violently against his mother and sister-in-law, and then there are these scrapes that took place in the Marines. Those are not bar brawls between guys drinking. They came from Oswald’s awkwardness, his inability to navigate his surroundings. Oswald was never one of the guys and there was a constant frisson between him and everyone around him. Most people probably found him just weird. Oswald arrived in Russia when Nikita Khrushchev ran the country and Dwight Eisenhower was the president of the United States. It was the Cold War. You’d think the Russians would want to open their doors to disaffected Americans, but they really didn’t want Oswald in their country. They really wanted to get rid of him. The sad irony is that Oswald thought his ideological commitments were going to facilitate his integration into Soviet society. He thought if he told them he admired their country and political ambitions they would welcome him with open arms. But the KGB was calculating and cold. All they cared about was what did he have to offer them. But he didn’t have anything. The only reason they let him stay was that he tried to kill himself and he became a PR problem. So they threw their hands up in exasperation and said, “You can stay.” Then they moved him to Minsk. The decision to move him to Minsk [in Belorussia, at the time part of the Soviet Union] was in keeping with a pattern that the KGB adopted with most defectors. It was to get them away from any centres of power, including Moscow or Leningrad. They wanted to put Oswald someplace provincial. Most of the Americans were sent to the Ukraine. For some reason or other Oswald was sent to Minsk. The idea was to keep him far away from anyone important, from journalists. To keep him as isolated as possible. Tell me something about his life in Minsk. Oswald started out as a celebrity, the famous American living in Minsk. But then his celebrity gradually faded. By the time he left he was a whiny outsider who wasn’t a very good metal lathe operator, which was his job. His life was comfortable. The Soviets gave him what was, by contemporary standards, a very nice apartment that would normally have gone to a family of three or four and he had a job with a local factory. His apartment had nine-foot-high ceilings. He had a beautiful view of the Svisloch River. He had friends and acquaintances within a close walk. There was cinema and an opera house and the KGB supplied him with extra cash. But he never made an effort to fit in. You don’t include any facts about the day of the assassination in your book. The book is not about the Kennedy assassination. It’s about the most important chapter in the life of the man who assassinated the president. Instead of rehashing facts and details we all very familiar with it seemed more fruitful to explore territory that is mostly unknown. Did you try to speak to his wife Marina? Is she still living near Dallas? Marina is living outside Dallas and I think she has said what she wants to say and is not going to say anything else unless. In my case I was most interested into parachuting into Oswald’s world and seeing that world from the inside out. That is what I tried to do when I went to Minsk. I spent a lot of time in Oswald’s old apartment. I met as many people as I could who had been part of his orbit. I met people who worked with him, neighbours, places he frequented. That was a good way to get a sort of psychological understanding of what the Soviet chapter was all about. JENNIFER HUNTER as usual did her anti-Oswaqld best. Contrast this smear job on Lee with two new interviews of Lees friends in the USSR to see just how many lies are in the book: rferl.org/content/oswald-interview-yahkliel/25173118.html
Posted on: Mon, 14 Apr 2014 04:40:16 +0000