What do You think about Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery (1996)?
The Kennedy assassination was first rumored during afternoon recess from Lincoln Junior High School. It being Park Ridge, Illinois, a number of seventh graders took it as good news. No one doubted the rumor. I was asked by another kid who'd become president now and had to think for a moment before coming up with Lyndon B. Johnson.After recess we were taken from class to the downstairs auditorium where we were addressed, solemnly, by Clifford Sweat, our principal. The teachers all appeared serious, very serious--probably worried about our sensitivities, about how this important news ought be conveyed to a bunch of thirteen and fourteen year olds. The snide remarks of the children of conservatives ceased. We were sent home.The next several days my family, like many others, was glued to the television, hearing rumors coalesce into "facts"; watching Johnson sworn in on Airforce One with the bloodied widow beside him; seeing the putative assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, himself assassinated by a former Chicago hood, Jack Ruby, while in Dallas police custody; witnessing the world-historical funeral procession in Washington, the burial in Arlington. The weeks that followed saw the print media cover the same material with detailed chronologies in Time, glossy color photographs in Life. The months that followed saw the hurried publication of the Warren Commission Report and the first of the books to question it, Mark Lane's Rush to Judgment.It was probably a year or two later that I actually heard Lane himself interviewed on the radio and began my occasional forays into studying the assassination, studies which have included the reading of scores of books, of which Mailer's is the latest.I do not subscribe to Mailer's conclusion that Oswald likely was the sole gunman, but then determining the facts of the assassination itself is not his primary concern. He and his colleagues appear to be intellectually honest and note many of the contradictions and loose threads which were left by the official accounts of the FBI and the Commission. They also attack, more than once, Posner's recent apologetic for the government's story. No, their concern is more for the character of Oswald and on this account they make a valuable contribution, primarily by going to the effort to interview many of his associates (and the KGB operatives who kept tabs on him) from his two-plus years in the Soviet Union, many of whom have never been interviewed before. What emerges is a believable, often sympathetic, portrait of a person both ordinary in the lower middle class trajectory of his life and extraordinary in terms of the means by which he tried, sometimes successfully, to transcend his background and conditioning.I've read a bunch of Mailer over the years, liking his non-fiction more than his fiction. The most recent books of his read have been Ancient Evenings, an ambitious failure, and his The Gospel According to the Son, another, rather poor, rather uninspired, attempt to represent the person of Jesus. This biography is worth reading both for the value of its reportage and the high quality of its prose.
—Erik Graff
If you like to read, and like to live with books, you learn that some books wait, shyly, for a mutual friend to say “I think you two might like each other.” Sometimes the fix-up doesn’t work — you just say yes, you take your chances — but when it does you feel grateful to that friend, forever, that he knew you like that. Knew the two of you, you and the book.Manny at Book Soup is one of those friends. Book Soup is on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. Everything around it keeps closing, but Book Soup remains, independent, ornery, seen it all and has lived to tell about it. A few months ago I saw they had Norman Mailer’s OSWALD’S GHOST on the front desk, by the cash register. I knew that Manny loved Mailer and asked him about this book. “Just read it,” he said. So I bought it, making a big deal about its being a real book, with pages, and a cover, and that real book smell (I like my Kindle, and have many titles on it. But Kindle books don’t smell.) I thought — am I that interested in Oswald? I am old enough to remember the sight of Jack Ruby shooting him in the gut, live, in 1963. But six hundred pages? When there are so many show business biographies to read, and books about the Holocaust?It’s a winner. It’s not about Oswald, not really, but about Mailer’s novelist’s attempt to force him into being a character in a narrative that makes any sense at all. There’s a blankness to Oswald, in death as in life, and OSWALD’S GHOST is the perfect title as it’s the ghost who is the author’s opponent. He goes to Russia, gets the KGB to open files, interviews the sinister set of kooks attached to the case. He tries to make sense of the Warren Report, and of the terrifying creature known as Marguerite Oswald, or Mom. By the end Mailer isn’t convinced that Oswald did or didn’t do it, and it’s his triumph as an artist that by the end you don’t care about that. Because you have been all over the world with a marvelous companion, one who can go off on the occasional tangent but always finds his way back to home, with a bagful of new stories to tell. Mailer took on Oswald, as he took on Marilyn, because as an American author of his time he felt he had to drag them into the ring with him, and see who was left standing. Two people, about whom the truth could never be known, facing a great writer with his dukes up.And so, on to the Hitler book … (CASTLE IN THE FOREST)(One interesting supposition of Mailer’s … he feels that Oswald could hardly have intended to be shot by Ruby, and that his goal might have been to have a Day in Court, during which he could air his not entirely crazy views about the workings of the secret world. He was, as Mailer sees it, a not very interesting young man (he was twenty-three when he did or didn’t pull the trigger) who knew it about himself, who hated that it was true, who tried to make it not be true and the rest is — history, as seen, invaluably, by Norman Mailer.Thank you, Manny.
—Richard Kramer
If you are looking to expand upon your knowledge of the various theories surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, this book is a must-read. Having made my way through numerous books on the subject, most of which were based on the notion that the Mafia and CIA were implicated with varying degrees of involvement, Mailer's book was the first I'd come across that argued the theory of Oswald as the lone gunman. While it is easy to be persuaded in either direction with all of the evidence (or in certain cases, lack of evidence) that has been presented over the years, up until the reading of Oswald's Tale, I'd been utterly convinced that a major conspiracy lingered just below the surface of what the US government has chosen to reveal with the release and withholding of pertinent documents over the decades since the assassination. Norman Mailer's account of Oswald's life gave pause to these previously held certainties, and it was done with the style and flair of Mailer's famous prose. This book might not completely sway conspiracy theorists from their ideas about what happened that awful day, but it will make them think. And since we will likely never know the full scope of this terrible crime, Mailer's objective account is a valuable resource helpful in discerning truth from outlandish fiction.
—Richelle
