Peter Savodnik
Peter Savodnik is the author of The Interloper: Lee Harvey Oswald Inside the Soviet Union.
From his Q & A with Randy Dotinga for the Christian Science Monitor:
Q: What is the big lesson of Lee Harvey Oswald?--Marshal Zeringue
A: For him, everything that comes is colored by bitterness and a sense of personal failure. He's a representative of a certain subset of Americans, the alienated American who doesn't know how to incorporate himself into the body politic. There are many alienated Americans.
Q: Did you gain any insight into Oswald's motive?
A: It's the one that's hardest to pin down. The better way to approach that is to look at the pattern that courses through his life. He bounced around from one address to another 20 times before he enlisted in the Marines. I think his motive was to escape the life he'd been assigned to, to elevate himself to a worldwide historical status.
We have this tendency to want to impose order or reason, some kind of explanation, on everything. This is part of our arrogance, or conceit.
Once we stop trying to make sense of the Kennedy assassination in some kind of hyper-rational way and look at it as...[read on]
