On the Trail of Delusion, Episode 14, Scott Maudsley on Oswald's Motive

[Steve M. Galbraith]

I think Oswald was a guy simmering below the surface about his circumstances like a volcano.  Sometimes there were signs of a possible eruption but mostly not.  That doesn't mean he was never going to erupt.  It's sometimes easy to forget that he was only 24 when he assassinated the president.  It wasn't like he had lived a long peaceful life as an adult before committing a violent act.  And I don't necessarily think of Oswald as a "violent" person.  He was discontent with his place in society and blamed others for that.  He was exploring ways to address that such as his defection and extreme political views.  When all that failed, his path eventually narrowed to that of an anti-hero that decided to resort to violent methods.

I'll agree with almost all of that - the accounts of him beating the heck out of Marina suggest a violent person, no? - but my only point was that the Oswald of Minsk was not the Oswald of Dallas. In Minsk he led a stable life with friends and other interests. The angry, withdrawn, anti-social Oswald of Texas was simply not there (and Marina doesn't mention anything simmering beneath the surface). Priscilla McMillan made the observation that she thinks Oswald regretted leaving Minsk, that it was a good life for him. But once he applied to leave he couldn't reverse the Soviet bureaucracy (something he knew about and detested).

He became completely unraveled when he returned, when his life hit a dead end (due to perceived American injustices) and he had nowhere else to go. But he was still a political person. So shooting JFK was probably a mix of impossible-to-untangle reasons, personal and political.

I'll just add: given his experiences in life, this isolation as a child, the repeated failures, the insults he faced (real and imagined) that the idea he would be a CIA agent or asset defending the same country that he grew to dislike, that he believed mistreated and was unfair to him, is utterly illogical. He hated the US; he wasn't going to defend it. But this is JFK conspiracy world and illogical ideas are what they traffic in as long as it supports a conspiracy.