Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy

Employment

Oswald experienced persistent employment problems that he blamed on his Soviet past but that the evidence attributes largely to his own shortcomings. He held a satisfactory job as a sheet metal worker in Fort Worth from July 1962 until he voluntarily left on October 8, 1962, despite telling Marina he had been fired. The next day he registered with the Texas Employment Commission in Dallas, expressing a desire to write rather than work in industry; aptitude testing placed him in the upper range on verbal and clerical measures, and counselors described him as well-groomed and articulate. He was referred to a commercial advertising photography firm on October 11 and began work as a trainee on October 12, 1962, but his employer found his output imprecise and his relations with coworkers strained, and he was discharged on April 6, 1963, ostensibly for inefficiency and a difficult personality. A supervisor conceded that bringing a Russian-language newspaper to the workplace did not drive the firing decision but “didn’t do his case any good.” After moving to New Orleans on April 24, 1963—leaving Marina and the child with Ruth Paine in Irving, Texas—Oswald took a job on May 10, 1963 as a greaser and oiler at the William B. Reily coffee company, though he told his wife and Paine that he was working as a commercial photographer; he was dismissed on July 19, 1963 for unsatisfactory work and for spending work time in a neighboring garage reading rifle and hunting magazines. Oswald’s Fair Play for Cuba Committee activities, publicly identified only after August 9, 1963, made finding further work harder: a Louisiana placement interviewer declined to provide references after seeing him on television, and his October 1963 application to another Dallas photography firm failed when its president warned a prospective employer that Oswald was “kinda peculiar,” knew Russian, and might be a Communist. He finally obtained work at the Texas School Book Depository, where he performed satisfactorily.