The President and the Provocateur explores the parallel lives of John F. Kennedy, born into wealth and celebrity, destined for glory and a violent death, and of Lee Harvey Oswald, born into poverty and obscurity, murdered in police custody and convicted - without a lawyer or a trial - of the killing of JFK.

50 years after both men were murdered, Alex Cox provides a chronological account of their lives' strange intersections, their shared interests, and the increasing body of evidence which suggests that Lee Harvey Oswald was working for some branch of the government - most likely the FBI or IRS - as an infiltrator of subversive groups, and agent provocateur.

The President and the Provocateur draws on five decades of accumulated evidence that Oswald was an intelligence agent and agent provocateur. Far from being an active Communist, Oswald was mainly interested in infiltrating right-wing groups (including the White Russian community of Fort Worth, the National States Rights Party, the Minutemen, and the Cuban Alpha 66 terrorist organization in Dallas and New Orleans). From this perspective his alleged purchasing of guns by mail may be the actions of someone attempting to build a case against right-wing gun-runners and their suppliers - something the IRS and Senator Christopher Dodd's Subcommittee were also doing, at exactly the same time.

The possibility that Oswald was sent as a spy to Russia has been raised before, but this is the first book to detail Oswald's continued pattern of intelligence-gathering and infiltration of political groups on his return to the USA.