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Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery

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Mailer's "non-fiction novel" of Lee Harvey Oswald is stunning, not just for the new information he has uncovered about Oswald's life in Russia between 1959 and 1961, but because Mailer has ordered this information to provide true insight into Oswald's psyche. At nineteen and just out of the Marines when he flew to Moscow, Oswald intended to apply for Soviet citizenship, believing that Marxism was "purer" than capitalism. Remaining in the USSR for two and a half years, he married Marina and fathered a child before becoming disillusioned with his poverty and deciding to return to the US.

In the USSR, Oswald was under constant KGB surveillance, and Mailer's first-ever access to the KGB files and his effective use of them give the reader a sense of who Oswald was between the ages of twenty and twenty-two. All the everyday aspects of his life, his constant fights with Marina (and his eventual physical abuse of her), his belief that he is meant for "high destiny," and his inability to find success and purpose in his Russian life, despite his high ideals, show a young man frustrated in every aspect of life.

Using files from the KGB, Warren Commission, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, and books written about Oswald by Gerald Posner, Priscilla McMillan, Jim Marr, and Carl Oglesby, Mailer presents an astounding amount of historical data. Keeping his prose style journalistic and factual, Mailer uses his talents as a Hollywood script-writer to create dramatic dialogues appropriate to the facts, bringing events to life and making this long novel move quickly. Making frequent use of flashbacks, he fills in background detail, recreating Oswald's life as a young boy in New York--his truancy, his assignment to a youth center (where he was picked on), his relationship with his overbearing mother, and his constant loneliness.

When Oswald returns to Dallas in 1963 with his wife and daughter, he still has dreams, still sees himself as "an instrument of history," and is still frustrated and unhappy. His claim of responsibility for the April, 1963, assassination attempt on Gen. Edwin Walker, a John Birch Society supporter, whether or not it is true, shows him acting out his belief that he is an instrument of history in the months leading up to Nov. 22, 1963. Six months after the assassination attempt on Walker, Oswald takes advantage of the accident of history that has brought the JFK motorcade past the window of the Depository where he works, and he acts out his self-declared destiny.

Presenting all the information available to him, Mailer maintains a balanced point of view. Though he mentions contacts Oswald made with the FBI, his attempt to go to Cuba, Mafia attempts to kill Castro, and Oswald's strange connection with Baron George De Mohrenschildt, a Russian emigre with some CIA ties, he draws no conclusions due to lack of evidence, leaving those to the reader. This fine novel organizes mountains of raw material, some of it new, to provide glimpses of who Oswald was and what may have motivated him. n Mary Whipple

Mailer is a skilled writer and thanks to him being allowed access to thousands of KGB surveillance files compiled on Lee Oswald he is able to paint an almost human picture of Oswald's time in Russia and one almost forgets the crime he is accused of commiting.

I do believe though that the charting of Oswald's life when he returns to the USA is perhaps tainted by the opinions of people who did not have any respect for him prior to his infamousy and this may be why the book cannot be wholly trusted as a truthful study.

Furthermore, he relies too heavily on the work of Pricilla Johnson, the biographer who had met Oswald in Moscow and became a so-called confidante to Marina Oswald after the assasination, a friendship she exploited to write a best selling story of Marina's time with Oswald.

Clearly, Marina does not know what she believes as over the years her account of life with Oswald has changed as often of as the weather.

Mailer himself does try to keep away from the controversy surrounding Oswald's possible guilt and gives little away as to what his own opinion is in this matter.

For this reason he does redeem the book coming across as a genuine story teller in this regard.

In Mailer's own words the subject remains as great a mystery as it was all those years ago.

Worth buying to read about Oswald's time in Russia.

If you are,like me,intrigued with every aspect of the Kennedy assassination,this book will add a mass of information on one of the lesser known aspects.The facts of Oswald's life raise more questions than answers,and little is straight forward.Mr.Mailer,however,has produced a plausible,scholarly though entertaining biography of a man who will forever stand at the centre of the 20th century's greatest mystery.Exhaustive but essential stuff,infused with Norman Mailer's unique voice.

This work by Norman Mailer relies in part on newly released KGB tapes of the Oswald surveillance. As is well known, Oswald sought to renounce his U.S. citizenship and then wanted to reclaim it and a valid passport to return to the U.S. with his new wife, Marina.

It is surmised that the interest of the security agencies was triggered by Oswald's lack of a reasonable motive as the basis for his conduct. (This lack of motive, this seeming unreason, goes all the way through the Oswald saga to its conclusion of murder and counter-murder.) Like Gary Gilmore, EXECUTIONER'S SONG, Mailer has a sort of existential anti-hero in his sights. His use of documentary sources to fill out his imaginative recreation of events is both bold and appropriate.

This book approaches the mastery of material pertaining to a troubled loner versus officaldom shown in EXECUTIONER'S SONG. The description of the KGB officer in charge of Oswald's case, his work schedule, his temperament, his family, is of great interest. Too, transcripts detailing the couple's interactions thicken the book's texture. Interspersed are the testimony and explanations of Oswald family members of the lives of Marina and Lee Harvey Oswald as given to the Warren Commission.

Mailer says that one impetus to writing the book was the availability of material from the Belarus KGB. Oswald's going to the Soviet Union as a Marine was astonishing because, Mailer opines, Marines do not defect. In Russia, torturing his vanity, Oswald was anonymous. Mailer is good at disclosing the mutually paranoid views of the super powers of the Oswald story. In addition to official sources, Mailer uses the work of authors Epstein, Posner, and McMillan. The result is excellent, a feast.

Anyone who has read Owen Barfield's classic "Saving the Appearances" knows what happened to the Ptolemaic cosmology during the Middle Ages, a cosmology in which it was propounded that the sun and all the other planets revolved about the earth. To bolster the equations which attempted to prove this mathematically using geometry, all sorts of weird and artificial props were used to account for the mounting anomalies in this paradigm: eccentric orbits to account for the erratic motions of planets like Mars, which appeared to move forward and then go backward. Arthur Koestler has called this Ptolemaic cosmology as it was received by Copernicus, the man who changed it all in the sixteenth century, "the ferris wheel cosmos." Copernicus's act of simply throwing out the cosmology as wrong, and instead assuming--correctly--that everything orbited about the sun and not the earth solved most of the problems.

Thus, Mailer's overblown inflated windbag of a book could be likened to one of these attempts at saving the appearances of an outmoded paradigm that has long since been ripe for discarding. Mailer's book is a confused, and confusing, mess: a montage of huge chunks of text clipped and spliced together largely from the Warren Report and a few other texts in order to bolster his view that Oswald acted alone.

Here are some examples of Mailer's muddle-headedness: he makes the case that Jack Ruby did not act alone in shooting Oswald, but was probably given the assignment by the Mob for some convoluted reason in which the Mob desires to take credit for an assassination that it did not order. Maybe. He also goes to some lengths, oddly enough, to point out that in his assassination attempt on General Edwin Walker, Oswald may not have acted alone, but may have been on the payrole of either the FBI or the CIA, or in league with George De Morenschildt, a man known to have been on the payroll of the CIA and who seems to have acted as Oswald's mentor during this period.

So, in other words, Ruby did not act alone and Oswald on this one occasion did not act alone and yet we are asked to believe that he DID act alone in killing Kennedy? Come on, Mailer, get your world view straight.

Then, in a lame concession to conspiracy, buried all the way at the end of the book, Mailer suggests that if there was a second gunman then it could just as well have been another lone assassin who happened to choose the same day on which to perform the same deed. Yeah. Right.

In the Gospel according to Mailer, there is no grassy knoll and all witness testimony claiming to hear shots fired from that knoll--including Robert McNeill of the McNeill / Lehrer News Hour, who was present and claims to have heard those shots unmistakably--is simply ignored. The Zapruder film? Ignored. Doesn't exist in the Mailerverse. The magic bullet? Mailer claims to profess ignorance of ballistics and to be only a novelist and so cannot take up such a topic for dispute. And yet we are asked to believe by the Warren Commission something that any fool with common sense knows in his gut to be false. Bullets may do weird things, but they are not quantum objects.

Mailer, a poor thinker when it comes to philosophy, even gets the philosophical implications of all this wrong when he says that the crux of the matter is that we Americans cannot except that a rogue gunman brought down such a mighty empire; that indeed, our sensibilities reject the presence of such chaos, and so it is easier for us to believe in a grandly manipulated conspiracy. Actually, the philosophical matter is this: the theory of the lone gunman is believed by people, and defended as though it were a matter of life and death, because they have a psychological committment to believing that history does not function the same way here in the New World as in the Old. There is a persistent belief that Americans are different: we are a utopian colony that has managed to escape from the same historical laws and conditions that have governed the unfolding of civilizations elsewhere. To recognize, then, that a conspiracy was involved is a little like having one's balloon deflated: America is no different after all. We, too, are part of history and subject to the same laws and forces as the Old World. THAT is the philosophical significance of the debate.

But I will confess that reading Mailer is fun for two reasons: one is that the book is well-written and never boring. The other is that Mailer is so easy to out-think because he really isn't very bright. (For example, he accuses Oswald, during his time as a radar operator at Atsugi, of selling U2 secrets to Japanese communists, but nowhere does he offer a shred of evidence in favor of this. Not even a witness testimony. He just assumes it as true apparently for no other reason that that he himself suggests it). One suspects that this intellectual insecurity is what drives him to relentlessly prove himself in book after book by attacking great cultural icons. "Well, I'll show them," he seems to suggest: Monroe, Picasso, Oswald, and lately, Hitler. (It is akin to actually counting how many books one reads in a year in order to assure oneself that one really is smart).

It is obvious by the timing of the date of publication (1995) that Mailer wrote his book as a direct response to Stone's JFK. "Well, I'll show HIM," he seems to imply. But to the tortured reader who actually slogs, as this poor reader did, through 800 pages of needless information and narrative padding in order to get to Mailer's depressingly banal and pedestrian view (The Warren Commission was RIGHT!) one is merely subjected to the pettiness of Mailer's ego. One walks away from this narrative with a worldview that is not one bit larger than one had going in. Mailer, it seems, has taken the safe path and guaranteed himself good reviews in the New York Times, which officially supports the Warren Commission, as in fact, does most of the media because such a view is a safe hole one can crawl inside and curl up in. Ahh. No need to worry about history after all. It doesn't happen here. We're all still safe in our suburbs, driving our BMW's and buying the latest gadgets. America. The land of the free. We can all continue to go on buying things. The coast is clear.

How ironic that Mailer began his career, (I suppose) as a critic of the Establishment and a sort of counter cultural rebel, but ends by becoming a defender of that very Establishment he set out to attack. But let's face it, the rewards are sweet: you get invited on the right talk shows, and to the right parties, and receive lots of media attention.

This is the only book by Norman Mailer that I have ever read. And, you can quote me on this, I'll never read another.

--John David Ebert,
author, Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons: Film as the Mythology of Electronic Society

At almost 800 pages, Tale is weighed down with endless detail. Still much of the detail is fascinating in itself, such as the KGB's procedure in following Oswald in Russia. Mailer actually got the reports of KGB agents following Oswald. Mailer put incredible effort into retracing Oswald's travels in Russia, New Orleans, Mexico and Texas and speaking to dozens of people who had contact with him. Mailer quotes numerous other writers. Only the last hundred pages got down to the action. His account of whodunit and why is necessarily speculative, but I don't know of a more credible one.

I found this to be a most enjoyable book. You don't have to be a conspiracy buff or a history fan to enjoy it (I am neither); it reads much better than the majority of contemporary novels being published today. Mailer takes documented facts and records to produce a coherent account of Oswald's life. I think "compelling" is an overworked word but in this case it really applies. I couldn't put this book down. Regardless of where you stand on the Kennedy assassination, you are bound to get caught up in this book.

Ever since the Warren Commission published its findings in 1964 on the murder of President Kennedy, the true essence of Lee Harvey Oswald and his motivation in carrying out the "murder of the century" have remained opaque. The Warren Commission drew a picture of a "frustrated loser", who probably due to feelings of jealousy and inadequacy, decided to kill the "young, handsome, rich, popular President". This seemed unsatisfactory to many people, providing a fertile ground for the spawning of the myriads of conspiracy theories that have flourished since then.

Fortunately, the fall of the Communist regime in the Soviet Union, which occurred while many of the people who knew Oswald during his sojourn there were still alive, shed much new light on Oswald. Norman Mailer took advantage of this to get much new information on Oswald's stay there which played a crucial in the development of his distorted personality. This work, in addition to new interviews conducted by Mailer with people in the US who had contact with him led Mailer, who originally believed that JFK's murder was probably part of a conspiracy, finally to come to the conclusion that Oswald was not just some ultimately unexplicable "nut" or "patsy", but that Oswald viewed himself as an international revolutionary, a potentially major figure in history (which he did indeed become for the wrong reasons), similar to the "international terrorists" plaguing the world today. Oswald had much in common with the murderers who perpetrated the atrocities of 9/11, i.e.
rage against humanity, ideological fanaticism (whether "religious" or "secular"), sexual frustration, etc. This helps to clear up the problem that was raised after the assassination in which people who knew Oswald said he "liked" the President. Terrorists do not kill people because they "dislike" them, but rather view murder as a "revolutionary act" directed to achieving a higher goal.
One important facet of the book is that Mailer quotes extensively from interviews of witnesses conductedy by the Warren Commission. Mailer points out that the memories of the witnesses were freshest at the time, and that memory tends to get fogged or distorted with the passage of time, particularly in this case where they are constantly being bombarded over the years by critical interviewers with an agenda.
This book is a major contribution to the historical record, and I am saying this as someone who is no particular fan of Mailer and his world view (as great a writer as he may be). I give him credit for being intellectually honest enough to change his views, although it should be pointed out that he doesn't reject the possibilty of a conspiracy (particularly in the case of Jack Ruby although he does admit that Ruby could not have started out that Sunday morning intending to kill Oswald), but he admits that there is no real evidence of one.
One significant weakness of the book is its lack of an index, but it is still a "must" book for those who want to understand this historical tragedy.

Like most folks who read this book, I've read countless books on the JFK assassination. I have not read one like this though; it's in-depth, detailed study of Lee Harvey Oswald is unmatched anywhere. During the course of my own study and conclusions on the killing of our president, I am appalled by the number of people who believe Oswald was some poor innocent bystander who was framed. Mailer's analysis reveals Oswald for what he was: a legendary liar, thief, scum and murderer.

This book has alot of good information. However, to me it seems to reach out to far for facts that are not there. I do have to say that I read the whole book just because I do like to read others point of view.