Mar. 25, 1964 - An American writer who interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald (pictured in 1959) in Moscow four years before his murder as the accused assassin of President Kennedy summed him up then as a person who “had to perform a yet more memorable and outrageous act” than his defection to the Soviet Union.
Priscilla Johnson, a student of Soviet affairs, gave this judgment in an article in the April issue of Harper’s magazine, just published. She had talked with Oswald all one evening when she was a correspondent in the Soviet capital for the North American Newspaper Alliance.
She did not believe that envy of President Kennedy’s “wealth and good looks, his happy fortune in general,” was an important factor in Oswald’s attitude. She believes that, to Oswald, the President was “a surprisingly abstract being, a soulless personification of authority.”
“I believe that Oswald yearned to go down in history as the man who shot the President,” she wrote.
She recalled that when she asked him how ordinary Russians viewed his defection, he replied, “The Russians I meet don’t treat me as any celebrity,” and she sensed that “to himself, Lee Oswald really was a celebrity.”
Suggesting that defection seemed to have failed him as a way of proving his differentness, she wrote: “Back in Texas, people forgot all about him. Even among the Russians, he ceased after a while to stand out as a curiosity. To be marked as the extraordinary person he needed to be, he had to perform a yet more memorable and outrageous act.”
