The Story Behind The Man Who Shot JFK
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 21 November 2018
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What did Lee Harvey Oswald do for two years in the Soviet city of Minsk? And why did the American authorities let him return without any fuss in 1963? A few months later he would be arrested for shooting the US President. Vincent Dowd has been listening to archive accounts of Oswald's time in the USSR and speaking to Anthony Summers who has written about the assassination of President Kennedy.
Photo: Lee Harvey Oswald on November 22,1963, during a press conference after his arrest in Dallas. Credit: AFP/Getty Images.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless |
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| 0:21.0 | And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less searching |
| 0:25.7 | and a lot more watching. Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:29.7 | Hello, this is the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Vincent Dowd. |
| 0:36.2 | Today I'm taking you back to Dallas Texas on Friday the 22nd of November 1963 and the assassination of the Lee Harvey Oswold had recently returned from a two-year-long stay in the Soviet Union. |
| 0:57.2 | President Kennedy and Governor John Connolly have been cut down by assassin's bullets in downtown Dallas. |
| 1:01.8 | The fifth is the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository. |
| 1:04.7 | Emergency supplies of blood also being rushed to the hospital. |
| 1:08.1 | Not long after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, |
| 1:12.4 | a 24-year-old former US Marine, Lee Harvey Oswald, |
| 1:16.6 | is arrested in Dallas for the murder of a policeman. |
| 1:20.0 | But the police soon decide, Oswald is also chief suspect in the Kennedy assassination. |
| 1:25.6 | Oswald insists he's innocent. |
| 1:28.0 | Then two days later, he is himself shot dead while being moved from a police cell to a court appearance. |
| 1:34.6 | This edition of Witness looks at Oswald's two and a half years as a defector to the USSR. |
| 1:46.0 | He'd been working in Japan on one of America's biggest secrets, the U2 Spyplane Project, |
| 1:52.4 | so it seems odd he was allowed to go to Russia at all. |
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