Oswald's Voice

New light may be shed on the assassination of President Kennedy by studying an issue rarely covered by researchers: Oswald’s voice. The PBS Frontline documentary Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald? premiered on November 16, 1993, and it was rebroadcast in 2013. But over the twenty-year period, little changed in the final film product. In the documentary, G. Robert Blakey, who served as Chief Counsel and Staff Director to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in the late 1970s, asserted of Oswald that “he is not an easy man to explain.” One topic that Blakey’s committee and the Frontline documentary filmmakers failed to explore was the complicated voice of Oswald.

A Southern accent is characterized by a slow, melodic drawl in which vowels are elongated, resulting in a casual, rhythmic cadence in speech that is especially prominent in elongated syllables. A “syllable” is a single, unbroken sound of a spoken word, and it is easy to detect a Southern dialect in the stretching of vowels in individual syllables. But in the recordings with Titovets and Oswald, it is apparent that Oswald is not speaking in a Southern accent. For example, the reading from Shakespeare makes it clear that Oswald’s voice is an example of standard American speech. He clearly understands the text, and he is carefully articulating consonants. And there is no trace of the vowel elongations that would denote a Southern accent. When Titovets and Oswald improvise several mock interviews, one of the roles played by Oswald is that of a Texas senator. This would be the perfect occasion for an exaggerated Southern accent in the manner of Lyndon Johnson that would evoke a caricature of a Southern politician. Yet, as spoken by Oswald, the senator’s speech is inexplicably British in sound, as opposed a Southern drawl. Oswald clearly grasped the comic intent of the improvisation because the two men are heard chuckling during the recording, yet he did not even make an attempt to impose a Southern accent when the situation called for it. For a 2013 conference on the JFK assassination, Titovets traveled to Dallas and played selections from his recordings of Oswald’s voice.2 Again, he informed the audience that he was interested in studying Oswald’s Southern accent. If Titovets had conversed with the locals while he was in Texas, it would have been readily apparent to him that his friend had not been speaking in a Southern accent on his recordings.

In the orthodox treatment of Oswald’s life, he is perceived as a genuine defector who sought a utopian existence in the Soviet Union, and one of the main premises of his life story is that he was a disgruntled Marine who hailed from the Deep South. Priscilla Johnson McMillan was a CIA asset and reporter who interviewed Oswald while she was stationed in Moscow at the time of his “defection” in 1959. In the Frontline program, McMillian appears on camera to indicate that “Oswald was a nice-looking young man and he spoke with a quiet manner and a little Southern accent.”3 The perception of Oswald speaking in a Southern accent has been so pervasive that when actor Gary Oldman was cast in the role of Oswald in Oliver Stone’s film JFK, he began with the premise that his character would need a Southern drawl. Oldman reflected, “I think I’ve got the accent in the bag, this sort of Southern thing, like Matthew McConaughey.” But after listening to Oswald in extant recordings, Oldman changed his mind, and his vocal interpretation in the final film cut included no hint of a Southern accent.4 In the Frontline documentary, Oldman was cast once again to read voiceover bites of Oswald that recur throughout the program. As in his vocal characterization of Oswald in the film JFK, there is no trace of a Southern accent in Oldman’s dramatic readings. Because Oswald was born and raised in the South, there has been and continues to be the assumption that he spoke in a Southern dialect. But in every known recording of Oswald’s voice, there is no semblance of Southern speech.

The sibling with whom Lee Oswald spent most of his time growing up was his older brother Robert, who indeed spoke in a pronounced Southern accent until his death in 2017. Robert appears intermittently in the Frontline documentary. His voice is heard early in the program when he recalls that Lee’s father had died before his birth and the boy spent time away from his brothers when they were placed in an orphanage. Robert recalled that “what Lee missed from his childhood, in comparison with me, was the whole family being together all the time.”5 In the word “childhood,” Robert stretches out the long “i” in a prolonged vowel sound. At the end of the program, Robert speaks the phrase “mind over heart.”6 Once again, the long “i” in “mind” is elongated. In both examples, Robert is stretching the long “i” into a protracted syllable. The vowel “i” thereby becomes the sound “ahhh,” spoken as “chahhld-hood” for childhood and “mahhnd” for mind. In all the known instances of Lee Harvey Oswald’s speech, there is nothing even close to Robert’s accent apparent in his speaking words with the long “i” sound.

Lee Harvey Oswald was born to Marguerite Claverie Oswald and Robert Edward Lee Oswald on October 18, 1939, and the father died two months before the birth of his son. But another boy, often listed in government documents as “Harvey Lee Oswald” was a Russian-speaking refugee from World War II brought to this country with thousands of other refugees from Eastern Europe. His birthdate occasionally appears as October 19, 1939, whereas October 18 was the birthdate for the American-born Lee Harvey Oswald. “Harvey” Oswald was placed with a caretaker parent who was given the name "Margaret” (as opposed to Marguerite) Oswald, who likely spoke Russian herself. The similarity in the names of Harvey and Margaret Oswald was of importance administratively to distinguish the young immigrant and his caretaker mother from the real Marguerite Oswald and her youngest son, Lee Oswald. During the Cold War, there were thousands of cases in which displaced persons were exploited in the early postwar era with projects conceived by Frank Wisner, the CIA’s director of clandestine operations and the CIA/State Department’s expert on Eastern European war refugees. In one of those cases, a young Russian-speaking refugee was given the name of Harvey Lee Oswald and trained in a long-term project to make use of his language skills for a spy operation during the Cold War. This background was covered up principally by J. Edgar Hoover and Allen Dulles, the two key figures who were influential in shaping the biography of Oswald published in the Warren Report. In suppressing this story, the public has been misled about the true identity of “Lee Harvey Oswald” for over sixty years.

Some of the earliest evidence for the two Oswalds occurs in New York City from 1952-54, when the two boys were using the same name, living in separate households, and enrolled in different schools. A boy named Lee Harvey Oswald was a truant remanded to the corrective Youth House in spring 1953. He was examined by a psychiatrist, Dr. Milton Kurian, who estimated the top of the boy’s head was at the level of his upper chest area when the two were standing face to face. The doctor recalled the boy’s height as no more than 4’8”. But around the same time, a surviving health card of Lee Harvey Oswald lists his height as 5’4 1⁄2”. Dr. Kurian recalled that the boy he examined answered to the name of Harvey. The doctor identified the boy in a photograph of a youngster at the Bronx Zoo. But when Oswald’s half-brother, John Pic, who resided with Oswald during a portion of his time in New York City, was shown this picture by the Warren Commission, he was unable to identify the boy as his sibling. In the doctor’s opinion, the voice of the boy “Harvey” was “general population speech.”7 But at almost exactly the same time that this boy met with Dr. Kurian, a Domestic Relations Court Case investigation included an interview with Mrs. Oswald by Attendance Officer James Brennan, who prepared a report for the court. Officer Brennan wrote that the delinquent boy’s schoolmates “ridiculed his mode of dress and different accent.”8 The boy with the different accent was the much taller Lee Oswald, who was being teased by his New York classmates due to his Southern speaking patterns. The shorter boy who preferred to be addressed as Harvey was recalled by Dr. Kurian as using “general population speech.”

Harvey Oswald and his caretaker mother spent the summer of 1953 in North Dakota, and in the fall of 1953, he enrolled at Beauregard Junior High School in New Orleans. The new environment in the Deep South was likely a culture shock to him. His eighth-grade classmate Ed Collier remembered that “we called him Yank because he had a Yankee accent.”9 Harvey’s homeroom teacher, Myra DaRouse, who also recalled the height of the boy to be 4’8”, remembered a passive, compliant student who preferred to be addressed as Harvey. When John Armstrong showed her the photograph of the boy at the Bronx Zoo, she identified it as her student Harvey. This was the same photo in which Dr. Kurian recognized the child he had interviewed as “Harvey” Oswald. It was also the same photograph in which John Pic could not identify his half-brother.

During this period in New Orleans, Oswald’s cousin Marilyn Murret recalled that Oswald’s classmates:

It is clear from Murret’s account that Harvey Oswald was experiencing a world that was foreign to him in the conventions of segregation in Louisiana. In 1954, he was apparently unaware that African-Americans were required to sit in the backs of busses and streetcars. He learned that he too would be ostracized and harassed if he sat with them in the segregated area. The testimony about segregation is telling because the real Oswald boy had lived in the South for thirteen years prior to his brief residence in New York. When he moved back to Louisiana, the widespread practices of apartheid would have already been so deeply ingrained in him that he would not have forgotten them after living for a couple of years in the North. Indeed, in an interview conducted by FBI SA John Russell Graham, John Pic related that when his youngest brother had arrived from Texas and enrolled in a public school nearby Pic's apartment, “Lee Harvey Oswald did not like the school because negroes attended along with white children.” (WC document 188, p. 24, December 10, 1963) The boy being described by John Pic was Lee Oswald experiencing his own culture shock in New York after being raised in the Deep South.

In another portion of her Warren Commission testimony, Murret took the time to praise Oswald’s speech when she stated, “his accent was very good. I mean he pronounced every syllable and the word endings were always pronounced.”11 This testimony is revealing, as an apparent family member of Oswald felt compelled to point out to the Warren Commission that her relative spoke in a distinctive accent. The fact that Murret even took the time to mention the way Oswald spoke demonstrates that his voice stood out uniquely in the Deep South. Murret correctly identifies how in a Southern accent, ends of words are frequently not clearly articulated, especially ending consonants. The articulation of a consonant is formed by the constriction of airflow through the vocal tract in which a partial closing of the tract occurs. The dropping of a final consonant at the end of a sentence may be commonplace in American speech, but it is especially prevalent in the South. The ending “r” will often drop out of the word “before” and is pronounced “befoh.” And the ending letter “g” is often silent, as in goin’ for going; lyin’ for lying; or fixin’ for fixing. Murret’s observations underscore the unique background of a boy who was speaking English as a second language, which he had likely learned while living in New York after being resettled from Eastern Europe.

In the week following the assassination, an aide sent a teletype on December 4, 1963 to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. The aide was William J. Vanden Heuvel, who was also President of the International Rescue Committee (IRC). The message was intended to alert the FBI that “the files of the IRC contain information pertaining to Oswald”:

There would have been no reason for the American-born Lee Oswald to be of interest to the IRC. But it was entirely plausible that the Russian-speaking Harvey Oswald would be identified by this organization if he were an immigrant from Eastern Europe. As a matter of course, Eastern European children grew up bilingual with Russian as a second language. As observed by journalist Anne Applebaum in her book Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, Eastern European children would be sent to live with another family at an early age in order to learn a second language. One of the most prominent of those languages was Russian.

Another tantalizing piece of evidence is the subject of an anonymous phone call to Mrs. Jack Tippit of Westport, Connecticut on the day following the assassination. Mrs. Tippit’s husband, a self-employed cartoonist for national magazines, was a distant relative of Officer J. D. Tippit, who was shot to death in Dallas on the afternoon of November 22. The anonymous caller indicated that she personally knew Oswald's father and uncle in New York City. They were from Hungary, promoted communism, and resided at 77th Street and 2nd Avenue in Yorkville (NYC). On multiple occasions during the call, the woman on the line indicated that she was fearful for her life in revealing this information. The Yorkville location offers a window into where Harvey Oswald’s “accent” described by Marilyn Murret may have been developing as he learned English as a second language.

Gary Oldman recalled that when he began researching Oswald’s voice, he instinctively felt about Oswald that “he’s got the weirdest accent in the world.”12 Oldman then worked with dialect coach Tim Monich, and together they synthesized a dialect that included “American, Russian and Spanish ... plus he had a speech impediment.”13 If Oswald were of Eastern European extraction, it is likely that he learned Russian as a second language in the place of his birth. When he later learned English in America, a slight Slavic accent may have been a holdover in his spoken English. Additionally, in learning English as another language in his new home, it is not inconceivable that Spanish inflections along with his Slavic speech patterns crept into his spoken English due to the large Latino population in New York City where he was likely relocated after the war. If Gary Oldman had known this background, he might not have thought that Oswald’s speech was “the weirdest accent in the world."

Peter Gregory was a world-class linguist and a native-born Russian who had been selected to accompany President Eisenhower to Moscow to serve as translator during the summit that was eventually cancelled due to the Gary Powers U-2 spy plane incident on May 1, 1960. Gregory was convinced that Oswald had learned Russian as a second language as a young child in his likely birthplace of Eastern Europe. When approached by Oswald in 1962, Gregory wrote a letter of recommendation for him, believing that he was “capable of being an interpreter and perhaps a translator.”14 It has often been claimed that Oswald’s expertise in Russian was either self-taught or acquired at a foreign language institute. Gregory thought otherwise. He posited that “Oswald’s Russian fluency was explained by immersion in daily life rather than attendance at some sinister Russian language school for spies.”15 He informed the Warren Commission that Oswald’s Russian language competency was so good that he could not have attained that level merely from the period he resided in the Soviet Union.

Even prior to the time he left for the Soviet Union, Oswald’s proficiency in Russian was apparent to his fellow Marines who witnessed him reading Russian language publications. During his final year in the Marines, Oswald met Rosaleen Quinn, the aunt of one of his fellow Marines, Henry J. Roussel, Jr. At the time, Quinn was learning Russian through the Berlitz language system and was interested in conversing with Oswald. In her Warren Commission deposition, Quinn asserted that “Oswald spoke Russian well.”16 She informed researcher Edward Jay Epstein that she had met Oswald in a cafeteria in Santa Ana where they spoke in Russian for about two hours. Quinn had been studying Russian for over a year with a tutor, yet “she found that Oswald had a far more confident command of the language than she did and could string entire sentences together without much hesitation.”17 Oswald met Quinn for a second time when they took in a screening of South Pacific, then adjourned to a local bar where they conversed in Russian once again. It is especially revealing that this young man, who had dropped out of high school following his freshman year, could “string entire sentences together without much hesitation” in Russian prior to the time he resided in the Soviet Union.

Oswald’s friend George De Mohrenschildt, a Russian émigré, petroleum geologist, and teacher of Russian language, observed the following about Oswald’s preference for speaking Russian as opposed to English: “As everyone knows, Russian is a complex language and he was supposed to have stayed in the Soviet Union only a little over two years,” but Oswald “preferred to speak Russian than English any time. He always would switch from English to Russian.”18 After Peter Gregory tested Oswald in Russian language competency, his conclusion was that, based on his spoken Russian, Oswald was “from a Baltic republic or even Poland with Russian as a second language.”19 While observing that Oswald made occasional lapses in grammar, Gregory’s son Paul, who spent a summer receiving Russian language tutorials from Marina, nonetheless told the Warren Commission that Oswald’s “command of the everyday language was excellent. He could express anything he wanted to say.”20 Oswald’s grammatical errors might be explained by his exposure to Russian as a second language likely as a child in “a Baltic republic or even Poland,” according to Paul Gregory’s father.

After the JFK assassination, Professor Vladimir Petrov, Chair of the Slavics Language Department at Yale University, studied a letter Oswald had written to Senator John Tower. Professor Petrov concluded that “the person who wrote the letter was a native speaking Russian with an imperfect knowledge of the English language.”21 In his analysis of Oswald’s letter to Senator Tower, the professor speculated that Oswald might have been a KGB agent sent to America as a substitute for the real Oswald, who had left America in 1959 after his discharge from the Marines. But the linguist never entertained the possibility that Oswald was one of hundreds of thousands of “displaced persons” following World War II, he was fluent in the Russian language, and he was in the employ of American intelligence with the goal of planting him in the Soviet Union for the purpose of acquiring valuable information on the enemy at the height of the Cold War. In an unrelated analysis of Oswald’s voice, three linguists at Southern Methodist University listened to the voice recording of Oswald from his 1963 New Orleans radio interviews without being told that it was Oswald speaking. All three of the experts concluded that the man was not a native-born American; rather, he was speaking English as a second language.22

He pronounces the name of the city as “New or ‘LEANS.” A native of New Orleans would pronounce the name as “New ‘OR-lins” or “New ‘OR-lee-uns.” The New Orleans parish and the avenue are pronounced “New or ‘LEANS.” But Oswald was mispronouncing the name of the city of his ostensible birth and where he was a student in both middle school and high school. There were multiple occasions in the conversation with Stuckey when Oswald mentioned the city of New Orleans, and the pronunciation was consistently “New or ‘LEANS.” By contrast, Stuckey pronounced the city’s name as “New ‘OR-lins.”

Throughout the radio interview, which demonstrates that Oswald was an effective debater and knowledgeable about geopolitics in 1963, there is a moderate degree of nasality that would be associated more with New York than the Deep South. Later in the year at Dallas police headquarters, Oswald’s nasality was especially apparent when he faced the reporters and responded to the question of whether or not he had killed the President. He replied, “No, I have not been charged with that.” Typically, nasality occurs in pronouncing the consonants “m” and “n,” but in this response, the entire phrase is nasal. In the New Orleans broadcast, the tendency to elongate vowels in Southern dialect, wherein a single vowel sound is split into multiple syllables, is completely absent in Oswald’s speech. For example, in the multiple occasions when he speaks the word “school,” there is no elongation of the vowel that would often be stretched into “sk-yule” in Southern speech. But in each instance, Oswald pronounces the word in a crisp, one-syllable sound. Early in his interchange with Stuckey, Oswald identified the administrative positions in the Fair Play for Cuba chapter as “a president, a secretary, and a treasurer.” In his pronunciation of the article “a,” in all three instances, Oswald used the long “a,” as opposed to the schwa, or unvoiced “a” sound as “uh.” Typically, the long “a” as an article would only be used for emphasis, and there was no need to stress the three generic positions of president, secretary, and treasurer. In other examples in the program, Oswald would continue to use the long “a,” as if he were unfamiliar with the phoneme of the schwa.

Oswald appeared on a second WDSU broadcast on August 21, 1963, which took the form of a debate. The group included the moderator Bill Slatter; Oswald; New Orleans broadcaster William K. Stuckey; Ed Butler, the founder of the anti-communist organization INCA (Information Council of the Americas); and Carlos Bringuier, the Cuban exile and member of the Student Revolutionary Directorate (DRE) who had clashed with Oswald in a dust-up on the streets of New Orleans. It is likely that actor Gary Oldman identified what he believed was a speech impediment from Oswald based on this recording. Oswald was effectively ambushed when the group confronted him with the facts about his residence in the Soviet Union from 1959-62, and there were occasions when he stumbled over words and filled his responses with nervous “uhs” under the pressure of being outnumbered. Oldman adopted and over-emphasized some of these staccato speech cadences in his screen interpretation. During the debate, Oswald once again used the long “a,” as opposed to the schwa sound, in the article in the sentence, “they do not have a very violent and sometimes emotional opposition.” He also incorrectly pronounced the word “superfluous,” placing the accent on the first syllable; he clearly knew the meaning of the word from a dictionary, but failed to accent the second syllable. Throughout the debate, it is clear that in Oswald’s habitual speaking, he does not elongate vowels in the Southern speaking that is apparent especially in the speech of William Stuckey. Stuckey failed to articulate the ending consonant “d” of Oswald’s name, pronouncing it as “Os-wull,” as a number of the Dallas police officials did over the assassination weekend. While Oswald has some nasality in his speaking, it pales in comparison to that of Butler’s speech during the debate. One can discern in this audio recording precisely why Dr. Milton Kurian identified Oswald’s speaking as “general population.” There is no hint of Oswald speaking in a Southern accent in the New Orleans broadcasts.

An analysis of Oswald’s voice is one piece of the puzzle in understanding his life story. G. Robert Blakey may have believed that Oswald was “not an easy man to explain.” As for so many other pundits over the past sixty years, this is Blakey’s way of saying, “We will probably never know the truth about the JFK assassination.” But the totality of the evidence in fact points to a flesh-and-blood human being that we can understand, especially when placed in the historical context of the Cold War. The man who was assigned the name of “Harvey Lee Oswald” was one of tens of thousands of refugees who came to America in the postwar years as part of a quid pro quo arrangement with the CIA. In return for utilizing their unique qualifications and skills in the cause of the Cold War, the United States Government granted citizenship to the immigrants. Oswald’s story would be completely unknown were it not for the fact that he was groomed and scapegoated for the JFK assassination. His biography, which is a skillful composite of two men, was prepared so efficiently by Hoover and Dulles, along with cooperation from the media, that it is not surprising that mainstream biographers will not venture into the area of trying to unpack Oswald’s life story, especially his youth.

The planners of the assassination of President Kennedy were faced with two major dilemmas about their patsy. First, the public could not learn that Oswald was working for the CIA and was sent to the Soviet Union as a government agent. Second, it could never be revealed that he was not even a member of the Oswald family, but rather an exploited and likely desperate immigrant child co-opted into Cold War intelligence operations. The government documents still withheld from the public are almost certainly records that pertain to the story of the two Oswalds. An understanding of Oswald’s voice is one step towards resolving the seeming contradiction about a young boy presumably raised in the Deep South who was somehow competent in speaking standard American speech and fluent Russian after completing only the ninth grade. The historian must rely on a combination of documentary and eyewitness evidence in order to come to terms with any complex event or topic. Our toolkit for the study of Oswald must also include the audio evidence. And, as is the case with so much of the story of the two Oswalds, the evidence of Oswald’s voice lies in plain sight.

James Norwood taught in the humanities and performing arts for thirty years. The curriculum he offered included oral interpretation, speech, and text analysis for the actor. He is the author of Former People: John F. Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev, and Lee Harvey Oswald at a Crossroads in History.

1 Titovets’ commentary begins at 25:15 in the Frontline documentary Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?, which may be viewed on the PBS home page at:

4 Even when the Australian actress Jacki Weaver performed the role of Marguerite Oswald in the 2013 film Parkland, she adopted a heavy Southern drawl, contrary to all the recordings of the voice of the short, stout woman who identified herself as Oswald’s mother.

7 Lancer Conference Presentation, “Harvey and Lee 1998”—Text and documents from the John Armstrong presentation; Witness section, p. 3 (printed June 12, 1999).

8 John Armstrong, Harvey and Lee: How the CIA Framed Oswald (Arlington, TX: Quasar, Ltd., 2003), 52.

15 Paul R. Gregory, The Oswalds: An Untold Account of Marina and Lee (New York: Diversion Books, 2022), 100.

17 Edward J. Epstein, Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978), 87.

18 Warren Commission Hearings, Vol. IX, 226 and George de Mohrenschildt, I Am a Patsy! My Contact with Lee Harvey Oswald, the Warren Commission, and the JFK Assassination Conspiracy (Create Space, 1983), 118.

21 James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, The Assassinations— Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK, and Malcolm X (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2003), 134.

22 Jim Marrs, Crossfire: The Plot that Killed Kennedy (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 1989), 547. Researcher Gary Mack reported the conclusions of the three linguists at SMU. I wrote to Mack, requesting the names of the three professors, but never received a reply.