Sixty years ago today, the president of the United States was murdered by Lee Harvey Oswald. No one experienced the tragedy like John F. Kennedy’s wife. The image of Jackie Kennedy almost instinctively, in a motherly way, scrambling to the back of the limousine to scoop up her husband’s smoldering brain material — her pretty, vividly pink dress splattered with blood — is one we would like to forget.
I would also like to forget Jackie Kennedy’s assessment of her husband’s assassin. The young wife of the young president would later oddly complain that her husband “didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. It had to be some silly little Communist. It robs his death of meaning.”
Silly little communist? Hmm. Sure, communists are silly. Damned silly. Their ideology, however, is deadly. Damned deadly. In that sense, there’s little that’s silly about communism.
The 1999 Harvard University Press classic The Black Book of Communism endeavored to tabulate a Marxist death toll in the 20th century. It came up with a figure approaching 100 million. The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, the preeminent U.S.-based center for detailing communist crimes, also arrives at the figure of 100 million. Professor Martin Malia, the late Cal-Berkeley expert on communism, aptly noted that the communist record offers the “most colossal case of political carnage in history.”
And even then, here is something still more shocking: This frightening number — 100 million dead — is actually quite conservative.
Take the figure relating to the Soviet Union, where the Black Book recorded merely 20 million dead. Alexander Yakovlev, a lifetime high-level Soviet official who became one of Mikhail Gorbachev’s chief reformers, and who, in the 1990s, was given the official task of trying to tally up the victims, estimated in his 2004 Yale University Press work, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia, that Joseph Stalin alone “annihilated … sixty to seventy million people.”
Similar levels of bloodshed were wrought solely by China’s Mao Zedong, who was responsible for the deaths of at least 60 million, and more likely over 70 million, according to the latest biographical-historical research. And then there were the killing fields of North Korea, Cambodia, Cuba, Ethiopia, Eastern Europe, Africa, and more. Among these, the North Korea butcher’s bill is several million, including 2–3 million who died during the famine there in the late 1990s.
Really, the death generated by communist governments in the 20th century is surely closer to 140 million.
Here’s a chilling figure for comparison: You can combine the dead from World Wars I and II — the most destructive conflicts in human history — and not come close to the deaths at the hands of communism.
Ronald Reagan called communism a “disease.” Actually, it’s hard to find a 20th-century disease that killed as many people as this ideological pathology.
And John F. Kennedy was its highest-profile victim in American history.
Kennedy, for one, was not naïve about the lethality of this ideology. As president, he warned fellow Americans of their “atheistic foe.” The “fanaticism and fury” of the “communist conspiracy,” said Kennedy with foreboding, “represents a final enslavement.” He insisted: “The enemy is the communist system itself—implacable, insatiable, unceasing in its drive for world domination…. This [is] a struggle for supremacy between two conflicting ideologies: freedom under God versus ruthless, godless tyranny.”
And on that fateful day, Nov. 22, 1963, America’s first Catholic president, a dedicated anti-communist who warned Americans and the world about their godless foe, was dead at the hands of one of communism’s expert gunners.
Here again, one person who keenly understood what communism had done was Ronald Reagan. In a speech in Indianapolis in July 1968, Reagan stated:
Five years ago, a president was murdered by one who renounced his American citizenship to embrace the godless philosophy of communism, and it was communist violence he brought to our land. The shattering sound of his shots were still ringing in our ears when a policy decision was made to play down his communist attachment lest we provoke the Soviet Union.
When Reagan became president, he (like JFK) would not play down the threat of Soviet communism. He called the USSR an “evil empire.” JFK certainly would have agreed with that label.
As for Oswald, he felt just the opposite. He was enamored with Soviet communism.
Oswald had grown up a very confused young man, searching for meaning in his life. He found it in communism.
Oswald’s fateful turn to Marxism came in 1953, shortly after the troubled 12-year-old and his mother moved to New York City — the headquarters of Communist Party USA, the Daily Worker, and American communism. He and his mom initially stayed with family, specifically, with his brother and brother’s wife and baby, in an apartment at 325 East 92nd Street. It was a volatile situation. Oswald and his mom soon moved to 1455 Sheridan Avenue in the Bronx.
A pivot point in Oswald’s hard-left turn came when an anonymous Marxist street agitator handed the boy a leaflet asserting the innocence of the Rosenbergs. The leaflet fingered America as complicit in the unjust destruction of the Rosenbergs. According to the Warren Commission report, this moment was Oswald’s “political awakening.” He dove into Marxist literature: “I discovered socialist literature. I had to dig for my books in the back dusty shelves of libraries.”
Lee Harvey Oswald’s ardor for international communism grew steadily from there, even as he joined the military to serve his country. But his loyalties were divided. He was smitten with Mother Russia. He was so outwardly head-over-heels that fellow Marines jokingly nicknamed him “Osvaldovich.” In September 1959, he convinced the U.S. Marine Corps to give him an early discharge. He ached to move to the USSR and serve global communism. A month later, in October, he arrived in Moscow. “I am beginning a new life,” he wrote his mother and brother. “I do not wish to contact you again.”
What happened over the next years is chocked with drama and conflicting and tantalizing details, particularly regarding Oswald reaching out to the Soviets. Much of his time was spent in Minsk, in Belorussia. There, he met and married a Russian woman, Marina Prusakova. They had a child together. Oswald and his new family returned to America in June 1962, where the 24-year-old prepared to kill the president of the United States.
Oswald was particularly passionate about the communist revolution in Cuba. Just as he once immersed himself in the Russian language, he dove into Spanish, wanting to serve Fidel’s workers’ paradise. He sought ought Cuban officials in Mexico, hoping to do anything to help the cause. “Fidel Castro was his hero,” Marina would tell the Warren Commission. “He was a great admirer…. He would be happy to work for Fidel Castro’s causes.” Vincent Bugliosi, preeminent authority on the Kennedy assassination, said that Oswald’s “devotion and ardor for Cuba knew no boundaries.”
Of course, John F. Kennedy wanted Fidel Castro dead. That reality further fueled Oswald’s desire to kill Kennedy. It would take Oswald a little time, but he eventually got close enough to take a shot. That day came on Nov. 22, 1963.
To its credit, the Warren Commission did not ignore Oswald’s communist motivations. The commission’s final report “endeavored to isolate the factors which contributed to his character and which might have influenced his decision to assassinate President Kennedy.” It listed five factors, which appear on page 23 of the huge report. The fifth underscored Oswald’s “avowed commitment to Marxism and communism,” and especially for Moscow and Havana. The commission concluded that this did indeed contribute to Oswald’s “capacity to risk all in cruel and irresponsible actions.”
Yes, it was a silly communist who killed Kennedy, alright — and a deadly one. His action was consistent with the deadliness of his ideology.
In the 20th century, communism killed over 100 million people. Fortunately, America was spared the deaths of millions of its citizens by this lethal ideology, unlike the USSR, China, Cambodia, North Korea, and elsewhere. And yet, one of communism’s perverse handmaidens delivered a deadly blow to America, too.
Sixty years ago, he killed our president.