What time did Lee Harvey Oswald arrive at his rooming house on November 22 1963?
Executive summary
Most contemporary accounts and the Warren Commission rely on housekeeper Earlene Roberts’ testimony that Lee Harvey Oswald entered the Johnson rooming house “about 1:00 p.m.” on November 22, 1963; Roberts said he stayed only a few minutes before exiting in haste [1] [2]. Official timelines in Warren Commission exhibits place Oswald’s whereabouts between roughly 12:33 p.m. and 1:50 p.m., with competing reconstructions that count transit times from the Texas School Book Depository to Beckley Avenue [3] [4].
1. Housekeeper’s clock: the primary eyewitness who fixed “about 1:00 p.m.”
Earlene Roberts, the Johnson housekeeper, testified that on Nov. 22 she saw Oswald enter the front door around 1:00 p.m., glanced at a living-room clock, watched him go into his small first‑floor room for roughly three to four minutes, and then saw him leave appearing hurried and zipping a jacket [1] [2]. Many secondary summaries — from CNN to local museum accounts — repeat Roberts’ “about 1 p.m.” observation because it anchors the short stop Oswald made between the assassination and later events [2] [5].
2. Official time window: Warren Commission exhibits and the 12:33–1:50 p.m. bracket
The Warren Commission built a broader timeline around Oswald’s movements; one exhibit used in later documentation summarizes “whereabouts of Lee Harvey Oswald between 12:33 PM and 1:50 PM,” encompassing his presence in the Depository, travel, and arrival at the rooming house [3]. The Commission’s report ties eyewitness observations, physical evidence, and transit estimates into that window rather than a single, universally precise minute [6].
3. Transit reconstructions: how long did it take to get home?
Some reconstructions calculate that Oswald took roughly nine minutes to walk from the Depository area to the rooming house after leaving a bus or taxi stop, a figure cited by History that aligns with Roberts’ account of a rapid arrival shortly after the shooting [4]. Other accounts note he used a bus and taxi that afternoon and arrived from the Greyhound annex or a nearby stop; those variations produce small differences in the precise minute he crossed the Johnson house threshold but still cluster around the 12:50–1:10 p.m. period [1] [4].
4. Consistent short stop: grabbed a few things and left
Every source in the provided set agrees on the qualitative detail: Oswald’s visit was brief and purposeful. Reports say he entered hurriedly, went to his room to collect a few belongings, and left quickly before Officer J.D. Tippit encountered him and before his arrest at the Texas Theatre [7] [8] [1]. That behavior is the reason Roberts’ clock reading matters: it marks a quick interlude between the assassination and the subsequent shootings and arrest sequence [2].
5. Why minute‑level precision is contested and rarely offered
No single provided source produces a definitive timestamp like “12:58 p.m.” or “1:03 p.m.” beyond Roberts’ “about 1:00 p.m.” The Warren Commission organized events into relative intervals and exhibits rather than an exact wall‑clock minute for the rooming-house arrival; later popular retellings pick a round‑figure anchor [3] [6]. Historians and museums reproduce the Roberts anchor because contemporaneous mechanical timing (synchronized public clocks, bus time stamps) that would settle seconds-precision is not presented in the cited materials [5] [1].
6. Competing emphases in sources: official report vs. tour operators and popular media
Official documents (Warren Commission exhibits and National Archives summaries) emphasize the interval and evidentiary links among Depository, package, and rooming house; journalistic and museum narratives favor accessible, human details such as Roberts’ clock reading and the image of Oswald “in unusual haste” around 1:00 p.m. [3] [2] [5]. Some tourism-oriented pages and retrospective articles simplify to “immediately after the assassination,” which communicates sequence but sacrifices Roberts’ more cautious “about 1:00 p.m.” phrasing [7] [9].
7. Limits of available reporting and what they do not say
Available sources do not provide a precise second-by-second, independently corroborated timestamp for Oswald’s entry at the rooming house beyond Roberts’ “about 1:00 p.m.” and the Warren Commission’s broader interval [1] [3]. They also do not present contemporaneous synchronized time-stamped records (for example, a photographed clock-face time, transit receipt, or radio log excerpt) in the materials provided here that would let researchers fix the minute more narrowly than “about 1 p.m.” [3] [5].
Bottom line: contemporary testimony and mainstream summaries place Oswald’s arrival at the Johnson rooming house at roughly 1:00 p.m. on Nov. 22, 1963, with the Warren Commission embedding that stop in a larger 12:33–1:50 p.m. investigative timeline [1] [3] [2].