The President Has Been Shot!: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy

Swanson notes that Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, did not plan to kill the President for long. “There is no evidence that Oswald hated the president,” Swanson writes, “Much evidence suggests that he rarely thought about him at all” (48). In fact, it is not really known exactly why Oswald assassinated Kennedy. Kennedy’s motorcade route through Dallas just happened to pass Oswald’s place of work, the Texas School Book Depository. Oswald planned to fire from a rifle on an upper floor of the building he worked in. It would be the first presidential assassination in history to use a long-range weapon. Past presidents subjected to assassination attempts had been shot at close range using pistols. Swanson speculates that perhaps the only reason Oswald targeted Kennedy was the coincidence that Kennedy would pass his workplace.

Next, Swanson describes Oswald’s biography. He was born in New Orleans in October 1939. From childhood, he was interested in Communism, which was “strange […] for an American teenage boy during the middle of the Cold War” (52). As a student in school, Oswald often rebelled against authority. Even after he enlisted in the U.S. Marines at the age of 17, he was court-martialed on two occasions, once for attacking a superior officer: “Oswald was a malcontent and constant complainer who loved to argue with his superiors to show that he was smarter than they were” (54).