Lee Harvey Oswald: 48 Hours to Live

What did Lee Harvey Oswald do in the 48 hours after he shot President John F. Kennedy? This riveting companion to the upcoming History Channel documentary follows Oswald in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, searching for the answers to the questions that have troubled America for a half century: Did he actually pull the trigger? Was he alone? And if so, why?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Five decades after the assassination many Americans are still skeptical of the Warren Commission conclusion. Polls show that a majority of Americans, swayed by a vast army of conspiracy books and propaganda, refuse to believe that Oswald acted alone.

The skepticism is understandable. Are we to believe that ideology played no role in the plans of a former Marxist marine, who had once lived in the Soviet Union, to kill the president of the United States? That a man who could not hold a job, or even drive a car, could mastermind a daring midday assassination? And to top it off, are we to accept that Oswald’s murder two days later at the hands of a local nightclub owner was a spontaneous act of outrage?

While this scenario seems implausible, it is far more convincing than any of the alternative explanations of the events in Dallas. It is the only theory that makes sense of most of the “known” facts, although when it comes to the Kennedy assassination it is difficult to find many facts upon which everyone agrees. I believe that the physical evidence proves that Oswald fired all of the shots at the presidential limousine on that fateful Friday afternoon. The question that lingers, and perhaps will never be answered with any certainty, is: Why?

Oswald took most of his secrets with him to his grave, but his actions in the final 48 hours of his life leave room for reasonable speculation about his motives. The final 48 hours of Oswald’s life — beginning with assassination of President Kennedy at 12:30 p.m. on Friday afternoon and ending with Oswald’s death at the Parkland Hospital on Sunday afternoon — reveal a complicated figure. The pages that follow will try to peel back some of the layers of Oswald’s personality and speculate about his motives and strategy. Was he a deranged loner searching for attention, or a misguided ideologue trying to make a statement? Or, as many have suggested, was he simply a pawn in a much larger plot to kill the president?