The Exoneration of My Friend Lee Harvey Oswald — Part II

The falsely accused assassin admired JFK's stands on civil rights and nuclear disarmament, says his Russian friend. He had no reason to shoot the president.

Ernst Titovets outside the apartment building in Minsk where his friend Lee Oswald lived from 1959 to 1962.

My friend Lee Oswald was ever open about his commitment to Marxism. Looking back at his life one might find an explanation to his fascination with Marx. In his “Manifesto” Karl Marx predicted the appearance of

“… an ideal highly developed technologically and a truly affluent society of equals. A place where a citizen would contribute an undemanding share of work towards increasing common prosperity while, at the same time, able to follow one’s chosen pursuit and enjoy all the best that such a society offered in terms of material and cultural wealth – from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs.”

Oswald, a boy from a poor family, happened to have read “Manifesto” still at his tender age of 15. With its happy promises, this modern fairytale appealed to his mind. It was based on a serious academic research in political economy. Historical materialism predicted an inevitable demise of capitalism, the rise of socialism next, to be finally followed by communism. The very existence of the Soviet Union, a country of socialism, served a proof of the apparent correctness of Marx’s predictions. (Alas, Oswald did not live long enough to see the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.)

I well remember our hot debate with Lee on socio-political organization of different states when Lee, referring to the Soviet-type socialism, observed that we lived here like those slaves. His current choice was capitalism. At the time, he was looking forward toward a possibility of building on American soil a reformed society where people would have good jobs and a decent living. In short, he considered Marxism as a means to remedy injustices in American society. This became his driving idea into his adulthood.