Diane Holloway

This is a very bad book indeed. As the title indicates, it takes the form of an 'autobiography' compiled from Oswald's manuscripts, letters and interviews. Holloway presents a disjointed account of the life in the form of an assumed first person narrative, with frequent lapses and digressions. The sole reason for reading the Autobiography is that it presents, in accessible form, the collected writings of Lee Harvey Oswald. Spelling and grammar are more or less regularised in the Autobiography. But Oswald's inimitable spelling is preserved in extensive appendices of his manuscripts and letters. The spelling and grammar are significant. Oswald was an intelligent dyslectic, largely self educated and a compulsive reader. I was led to read Diane Holloway's book, in this anniversary year of President Kennedy's assassination, by Oswald's haunting self characterisation: his father's early death left him with 'a far mean streak of indepence brought on by negleck'.
The appendices are extensive. They include Oswald's own account of his early life, his correspondence and the manuscript of a projected book about his years in Russia and his reflections on communism and capitalism. None of this would be of any general interest, of course, if Oswald had not perched at a window on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas and opened fire on the presidential motorcade. In that brief span of six or seven seconds, Oswald emerged from obscurity. The disillusionment and failures of his short and disordered life, up to the point when he shot the President, were transformed by that event and seemed suddenly to acquire a retrospective coherence and significance. Yet blind chance seems to have determined the course of events. Oswald found employment at the Book Depository some weeks before the route of the presidential motorcade was known. His realisation that a high unoccupied storeroom in the Book Depository provided an eyrie for an assassin might have been decisive in his choice of Kennedy as a victim. Oswald was ready to kill someone of political significance: some months before, he fired a shot at General Edwin Walker and missed. There is no indication in the record of Oswald's activities, correspondence or manuscripts of any particular fixation on President Kennedy.
What these records do reveal is Oswald's progressive marginalisation and self inflicted loss of a negotiable social identity over the last five years of his life. He had failed in his attempt to renounce his US citizenship and failed again in his attempt to acquire Russian citizenship. These failures led in turn to the official transmutation of his honourable discharge from the US Marine Corps to a dishonourable discharge. In the months before the assassination he made vain attempts to recover that lost status. He made equally vain attempts to return to Russia via Cuba, though his rejection of Soviet communism was by then complete. He described himself as a 'Marxist', caught in a limbo between the US, which he had rejected, and the USSR, which had declined to accept him. Always a liar, he manufactured false identities for himself and falsely claimed affiliation with various dissident political organisations in the months preceding the assassination. The organisations disowned him and the false identities were manufactured for no apparent purpose. He was by then virtually unemployable as a consequence of his political opinions, his isolated arrogance and his slack indifference to the demands of those who took the risk of giving him a job. His marriage to Marina, his Russian wife, was disintegrating as she turned for support to the expatriate community.
It is possible that Oswald believed that he could, by this one definitive act of shooting the President of the United States, re-establish an identity for himself. If that is a possible reconstruction of his motives, there is irony in the further and well supported hypothesis that Oswald did not fire the bullet that killed the President. It is likely that he was too poor a marksman and that there was too little time for him to discharge the three shots fired at the presidential limousine. The fatal shot may have been fired by another, perhaps by accident.… (altro)