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

While Manchester hinted at possible psychosexual motives for the assassination,
Dr. Renatus Hartogs, the same psychiatrist who examined Oswald as a teenaged truant in
New York City and was quoted extensively in the Warren Commission, tried to explain
the alleged assassin’s motive in psychological terms. In a 1965 book co-authored with
Lucy Freeman titled The Two Assassins, Hartogs used the Warren Commission report as
a means to put Oswald, as well as Ruby, on the couch for a Freudian examination. In
Hartog’s words, the book was “not an attempt to condone, or to blame. It is an attempt to
understand” in order to “save other men from being slaughtered by strangers” in the
future. 145 Hartogs recounted Oswald’s life as portrayed by the Warren Commission,
explaining why certain events were supposedly important psychologically in
understanding the alleged assassin. Hartogs described his own examination of the young
Oswald and his apparent psychological reasons for allegedly killing Kennedy.
Hartogs’ account of his examination of Oswald went beyond his own meager
report about the truant, and it is hard to believe he would have such a vivid memory from
such a brief encounter whose importance was only apparent after the assassination.
Hartogs claimed that he remembered Lee Harvey Oswald as “a slender, dark-haired boy
with a pale, haunted face.” He wrote that he “remembered thinking how slight he seemed
for his thirteen years. He had an underfed look, reminiscent of the starved children I had
seen in concentration camps.” 146 (Surely, Oswald was not underfed to that extent.)
Hartogs described Oswald’s demeanor as “withdrawn, almost sullen…I could not
145
Dr. Renatus Hartogs and Lucy Freeman, The Two Assassins, (New York: Zebra
Books, 1976 (1965)), 13.
146
Hartogs and Freeman, 92.
75