[Sample B: Approval/Signature Sheet] - George Mason University

what the commission called, “His urge to try to find a place in history and despair at
times over failures in his various undertakings.” 328
In trying to reconcile the joking Oswald he knew in the Marine Corps and the
image of Oswald as Kennedy’s assassin, Thornley blamed both his former friend and
U.S. society. According to Thornley, Oswald reached a state of “frantic despair” in
which the jokester and idealist the author knew in the Marine Corps became a “cold-
blooded killer.” 329 This despair arose because of his disillusionment with the United
States. According to Thornley, Oswald’s “religion was Communism not because of any
great superiority on the part of that ideology, but for the lack of a better alternative
conspicuously available to him in the United States of America.” 330 As Thornley would
explain, “In using the word ‘misfit’ to describe Oswald we confess that we live in a
closed society – for only where individualism is difficult or impossible can the word
‘misfit’ have any significance.”
A search for true freedom caused Oswald to defect to the Soviet Union, to despair
upon his return to the United States, and to conclude that “there was little difference”
between the two societies. Oswald’s “frantic despair” resulted from the lack of
“diversity” in the society and culture of the United States, and was “a natural reaction to
the absence of alternatives.” 331 In this formulation, Oswald the assassin is not a nihilist
328 WC Report, 23.
329 Thornley, 25.
330 Thornley, 29.
331 Thornley, 86-87.
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