Assassination!: The Brick Chronicle of Attempts on the Lives of Twelve US Presidents (21 page)

“I believe that the Kennedys bought the presidency and the White House,” Pavlick told police. Before Kennedy could become president, Pavlick said he intended to “remove him in the only way it was available to me.”

Pavlick was never brought to trial but was confined to mental hospitals for six years. Upon release, he lived in Manchester, New Hampshire, where he was often seen wearing a sandwich board in public, holding a petition for a public hearing to clear his name. He died in 1975, at age eighty-eight.

Taken for psychological assessment, doctors noted Oswald had compensatory fantasies of omnipotence and killing people. He scored a well above average IQ of 118, and one social worker noted “ a rather pleasant, appealing quality about this emotionally-starved, affectionless youngster.”

In New York City, Oswald had his first exposure to Marxism, being handed a flyer protesting the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for supplying nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. An avid reader, Oswald spent much of his time in high school reading the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Wanting to follow in his older brother’s footsteps and to escape his overbearing mother, Oswald joined the US Marines as soon as he reached the eligibility age of seventeen. In training he learned to use a rifle to hit targets up to 500 yards away, becoming a certified sharpshooter.

He also trained to become a radar surveillance specialist and was shipped off to Atsugi, Japan, where he worked as a military aircraft controller at a hub for the high altitude U-2 planes used to spy on the Soviets. His superiors praised his performance.

In his downtime, Oswald did not join his fellow marines on their excursions into Tokyo in search of beer and women but instead read books like Orwell’s 1984, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and taught himself to speak Russian with rudimentary fluency.

While in Japan, Oswald had his first sexual experience, hiring an expensive prostitute. Then one day in the barracks he shot himself in the left arm when he accidentally dropped a pistol he had mail-ordered and was carrying without authorization.

Oswald was subsequently court-martialed, demoted, and spent seventeen humiliating days in the brig. After a stint in Taiwan and the Philippines, he was put on janitorial duty for the last months of his enlistment. Meanwhile, he began to idealize life in the Soviet Union and made plans to defect.

Upon receiving his honorable discharge from the Marines, Oswald set off on a passenger liner to France, took a boat across the channel to England, and then a plane to Finland, where he arranged for a seven-day visa to the Soviet Union. Taking a train across the border he arrived in Moscow just three days before his twentieth birthday.

A tour guide was assigned to him by the government, and Oswald told her of his wish to become a Soviet citizen. In a written statement, Oswald stated, “I am a communist and a worker and I have lived in a decadent capitalist society where the workers are slaves.”