Within hours of hearing that President Kennedy had been shot and killed, the TV newscasters announced there'd been an arrest. Lee Harvey Oswald was named as the assassin.

Let me explain: I was 16 years old, old enough to be shocked by the assassination, young enough to have questions about everything being reported. It wasn't skepticism, it was more along the lines of why is the sky blue?

How did they figure out so fast who the killer was? I wondered. It was 1963. A slower time. Everything took longer.

Over the next hours and days the story came out. Oswald had shot a police officer on the street and then he'd been seen going into a movie theatre.

It still didn't make sense to me. Why'd he kill a cop? How did the police put two and two together and know the cop killer was the same man who killed the President?

The police had the gun used to shoot President Kennedy,

It was found where Oswald worked.

Oswald left work right after the shooting and didn't return.

The FBI knew about Oswald.

And the reason they knew is that Oswald had gone to the Soviet Union, renounced his American citizenship, and then a few years later returned to the U. S.

The newscasters were repeating all of this information. I remembered my parents talking about a story in the newspaper about an American who had defected to the Soviet Union.

Our government had let him come back? Why?

He'd defected to live behind the Iron Curtain, given up his citizenship here, and then when he didn't like it there we let him come back? Without being arrested? And he brought a wife with him? The Soviet Union didn't let their citizens leave, so why did they let her out?

None of it made sense. But that's the story the newsmen were telling, and they didn't seem to have as many questions as I had.

Little by little, over the years since President Kennedy was assassinated and Oswald was killed, I've learned more about Oswald.

Once, just once, I saw a short film of Oswald being interviewed when he was in New Orleans. He was said to be handing out fliers for the Fair Play for Cuba organization, and on the film he was talking about that.

He spoke well.

That really surprised me.

Everything I'd ever heard on the news or read in a newspaper portrayed Oswald as a moron. Low intelligence. Loser. White trash.

He didn't look like much, that's for sure, but he did speak well.

A truly stupid man could not have stood in front of a TV camera and explained his cause the way Oswald did.

He struck me as arrogant and not at all intimidated by the questioner.

I realized Oswald was not the man I'd been led to believe he was.

Since then I've learned that at 15 years old, Oswald heard about the Rosenbergs, who had been arrested and executed for being spies. They had spied for Russia.

Maybe he decided he wanted to be a spy.

At 16, Oswald declared himself a Marxist.

Right after his 17th birthday he joined the Marines. He'd dropped out of school after the 9th grade.

As a Marine, Oswald qualified as a sharpshooter.

Then, when he was 19, he received a hardship discharge from the Marines and only days later was on his way to Moscow.

It has been reported that the Soviets sent him to live in Minsk, which is in Belarus, and he was given a job in a factory and an apartment. He remained in the Soviet Union for roughly two and a half years.

It was June, 1962, when Oswald returned to the U. S.

In April, 1961, the Bay of Pigs assault on Cuba failed. At the last minute, President Kennedy had refused to allow air support for the operation. Oswald was in the Soviet Union at that time.

He was back in America in time for the Cuban Missile Crisis in October, 1962, when President Kennedy held fast to his demand that the Soviet Union's ships leave the area.

President Kennedy had 13 months to live.

On April 10, 1963, Oswald shot at Major General Edwin Walker but missed killing him.

In September, 1963, Castro warned American leaders they must not continue to try to kill him or they themselves would not be safe.

That was definately a warning and a threat.

In late September and into early October, Oswald spent 5 days in Mexico, going from the Soviet embassy to the Cuban embassy, supposedly trying to get a visa to go to Cuba.

This all seems very conspiratorial, but there are some problems with it. Oswald was broke. He didn't even own a car. If he was working for Cuba or the Soviet Union, and meeting with them in Mexico, wouldn't they have given him money? If he planned to go to Cuba after the assassination, he'd need money to get there, wouldn't he? But he was broke.

Karl Marx was always broke, too, causing his wife and children to live in dire poverty while he sat on his backside and fantacized how he'd change the world if he was King.

While professing sympathy for the lowly working man and imagining a society where the floor sweeper in the factory would have as much as the owner of the factory had, Karl Marx himself lived in worse povert than the working man. He lived off the charity of friends.

Too lazy to work, Marx found a good excuse not to: his own philosophy of the unfairness of capitalism.

And this is the philosophy Oswald chose to believe in.

And like Marx, Oswald was a loser. He tried to make himself important in the Soviet Union but couldn't. Obviously, whatever military secrets he'd learned while a Marine weren't worth much to the Soviets. They sent him to a factory.

Far from being an important man in the Soviet Union, he'd found himself working a routine job and living without many things we take for granted in America, such as grocery stores full of food, roads full of cars, TV in most homes, movie theatres, pizza places and hot dog stands.

Of course he wanted to leave.

And nobody cared.

The Soviets had no use for him. It was easier to let him go than to try and make him happy.

And the U. S. let him back in the country and let him go to Texas, not arresting him, because they thought he was useless, too.

But, though Oswald was uneducated, he wasn't stupid. He'd gotten himself to Moscow and he'd gotten himself back home. That's what the FBI missed, didn't consider.

Had Oswald gone to Mexico to try to get them to back his plan to kill the President?

That seems likely. He would have wanted money, first of all.

He didn't get it. Whatever information they had about him was probably quite unflattering, along the lines of Oswald being a useless nut who wanted to be important.

Oswald chose to believe in Marxism because that philosophy made him feel equal to anyone.

He chose to assassinate the President to prove he was 'somebody', a superior person, better than a spy. And he'd probably decided a small country like Cuba would treat him better than the Soviet Union had. He was still looking for utopia.

Why did he kill the cop?

Probably because he thought the cop was suspicious of him. After shooting the President, it seems likely he'd be feeling paranoid.

In the end, though, I think the media, the TV, newspaper, and magazines, portrayed Oswald wrong. He wasn't ignorant or of low intelligence. He had enough brains to carry out the assassination without being caught beforehand.

If he'd been described correctly, if the media had told the truth about him as they learned it, there probably wouldn't be all of the conspiracy theories there are.

As for the police being so quick to say they had the assassin, that's just another aspect of those times, 1963, when two and two added up to four and the police weren't afraid of rushing to judgement. They figured they got their man, and they said so.