Why in the damned world would anyone want to jump back into the morass of lies and
suspicions surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy? Does it really matter any more
who pulled the trigger or triggers in this most awful of American tragedies? Thirty-two years
and a million hours of research have intervened since that black day in Dallas and still no
presiding scenario has been resolved. Shouldn't we just let this ugly little sore in American
history heal up and scar? Shouldn't we move on to more pressing needs? Healthcare, ecology,
education? Why must we keep picking at this scab, causing it to bleed again and again? Why
should Norman Mailer, arguably the most significant American journalist of the last fifty years,
invest his reputation and that of Random House Incorporated to worry again upon this old bone?
"One stimulus to the writing of this book was an offer from the Belarus KGB to allow
a look into their files on Oswald," writes Mailer as he begins volume two of his 791 page
non-fiction novel, Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery. To Assassination nuts and conspiracy
fiends alike this is reason enough to exhume this old bone. With the collapse of the Soviet Union
in 1991 and the gradual opening up of clandestine Russia, veil by veil, there should be
considerable interest, to some, about what the KGB might have thought about this peculiar
marine's tentative defection to the Soviet Union. Add to this Mailer's own invariably
comprehensive reportage and his unique capacity for psychological investigation, and
much like his exploration of convicted killer Gary Gilmore in the Pulitzer Prize winning
Executioner's Song, we have a fascinating and involving piece of writing for just about
anyone who likes a good who-done-it.
"We are," writes Mailer, "in effect, studying an object (to use the KGB's word for a
person under scrutiny) as he tumbles through the prisms of a kaleidoscope. It is as if by such means we
hope to penetrate the psychology of Lee Harvey Oswald." It is Mailer's intent to paint a
psychological portrait of Oswald. A portrait so real and dynamic he hopes that it, in conjunction
with the details of the incident itself, will help us decide whether Oswald was in fact a lone assassin,
as determined by the much maligned Warren Commission in 1964. Or if he was part of a
"probable" conspiracy, as reported by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1979.
This is an ambitious task. Even for Mr. Mailer. Objectivity needs be absolutely hairline in the subtle
slanting of every unanswered nuance in the creation of his highly complex protagonist
Lee Harvey Oswald.
"This book...was undertaken without a fixed conclusion in either direction;" he confesses.
"Indeed, it began with a prejudice in favor of the conspiracy theorists. All the same, one's plan for
the work was to take Oswald on his own terms as long as that was possible--that is, try to
comprehend his deeds as arising from nothing more than himself until such a premise lost all
headway." Intriguing concept.
And through the course of the book, Mailer makes every effort to provide objectivity,
so much so, that this white whale of Oswald feels to be as much an enigma for the author as he
proceeds, as he is to the reader in his progress. Over and over again, he attacks the facts, fearlessly
and painstakingly, particularly in his review of the KGB reports that repeatedly question Oswald's
motives, his intelligence, his felicity with the Russian language, and his emotional stability. They, it
seems, were as uncertain of Oswald's defection as were the American's. Curiously, intelligence
agencies on both sides of the Iron Curtain viewed this twenty-year-old in the role of double agent.
Roughly half the book concerns itself with Oswald's life in Russia, and it is mostly new
material for the thirsty assassination buff. Upon this solid foundation, the second half of the book
reconstructs the assassination drama upon a backdrop of investigative survey. Drawing from the
Warren Report, the work of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Gerald's Posner's
Case Closed, Priscilla McMillan's Marina and Lee, Jim Marrs' Crossfire, Carl Oglesby's
The Yankee and Cowboy War, and other sources, Mailer presents the entire case, every loose
end, every conspiratorial supposition, every strained conjecture, with clarity and objectivity, to
the extent, that there may be no better book to introduce a new student to the subject. In total,
the picture he paints is an excellent one, but not a new one. Thirty plus years of investigation by
scores of researchers have brought no conclusive answer, only question after question and serious
suspicions about the dark machinations behind the deed. And Mailer can do no better. Still he
takes a swing at it.
After giving us everything, accurately and dramatically, and basically proving (to this reader
anyway) that nothing conclusive can be determined about Oswald's part in the shooting, Mr. Mailer
inexplicably concludes with a gaping implausibility. Despite the fact that he has shown Oswald had
questionable FBI liaisons, had indirect contact with mob kingpin Carlos Marcello, and that the CIA
connected Oswald to the assassination attempt on John Birch leader General Edwin Walker six
months prior to the JFK assassination and did not arrest him; despite the fact that the House Select
Committee on Assassinations' extensive investigation concluded "that the most likely family bosses
of organized crime to have participated in such a unilateral assassination plan were Carlos Marcello
and Santos Trafficante;" despite the fact that there is no piece of evidence nor argument more explosive
or revealing than the once secreted-away by Time-Life, home-movie taken by Abraham Zapruder,
that all but unequivocally proves, regardless of what Oswald might have been doing, that at least one
shot (and most likely the fatal shot) came from some location other than the School Book Depository;
despite all this, Mr. Mailer concludes, "that Lee had the character to kill Kennedy, and that he probably
did it alone." Moreover, "the odds in favor of one's personal conclusion (meaning Mailer's) can be no
better than, let's say, 3 out of 4 that he is definitively guilty and the sole actor in the assassination."
Three out of four? How about one in a thousand? This indeed is strange. No, worse than that! In reading
this statement, one wonders if Mailer bothered to read his own book. If Mailer's psychological portrait
proved anything, it was that Oswald did have the makings of a megalomaniac, but that also he looks like
a perfect patsy, the perfect pawn! God, it almost seems that Mailer, like Ruby, is screaming at us to
have him take a lie-detector test! (Personally, I don't get it. And why does it bother me so that Mailer's
last book was about the CIA?)
So what exactly does this mean? To Hell with the details and the facts of the assassination?
Damn the worries about who shot who and magic bullets and Jack Ruby's meeting with Santos Trafficante
in a prison cell in Cuba in 1959? Forget about Mailer's book? Forget about this being a book review?
Yes. Let's just step back and take a long look at this thing, this assassination phenomenon, the act
and the reaction and our obsession with it all. What does it tell us about ourselves? What does it tell us
about our government, and about the state of affairs presently at work in our country today?
Within the story of the Kennedy assassination lies an x-ray vision of the innermost workings of
our government. Through the course of the phenomenon--assassination, cover-up, debate, congressional
hearings, private investigation, Oliver Stone's movie, we are indirectly given a clear window into the bizarre
world of the intelligence community that lies behind the cardboard facade of the White House and the
Capitol Building. We are introduced to the various gradations of informants, operatives, agents, and illicit
sources that are part of the intelligence community's information gathering network and operations. We
see the jealousies, barriers, overlappings, and power struggles between agencies, the FBI, the CIA, the
Dallas Police Department, the Warren Commission, even underworld criminal organizations and the KGB.
We are shown the infrastructure of the intelligence community. And it is a sobering sight. We see a monster
created out of the Cold War, a war of lies, double-agents, and disinformation. Also revealed is the true
nature of these last fifty years that could be accurately labeled the age of deceit--an age that still marshalls
on. And no event, no war, no catastrophe, more exposes the icy heart of this age than the gangland slaying
of our 35th President.
In 1964, the party line was that a lone nut in Dealey Plaza was responsible. This lie has steadily torn
the heart out of our democracy. Thirty-two years after the fact, the central casualty of the Warren
Commission's charade has been the public's trust. There is no trust in our government at all anymore.
Stop the man or woman on the street. Ask them if they trust the system that broods inside the freeway
belting our nation's capitol. So awful is the state of things that laughter is apt to be the most common
response. Followed by a sardonic, NO. And then maybe a flood of vulgarities. And for good reason!
Only forty per cent of the people voted in the last national election. And we call this a democracy? Hell,
the majority decided not to participate! We have a problem here.
Ten months after the assassination, in September of 1964, the findings of the Warren Commission
were made public in a twenty-six volume report. Simply, the commission had determined that Lee Harvey
Oswald was the assassin and that he was working alone. Despite the impeccable reputation of Chief Justice
Earl Warren, chairman of the commission, the report was met with considerable criticism almost
immediately. Still it passed silently into the realm of recent history and was mostly forgotten by all except a
handful of individual researchers. Approximately three years later, New Orleans District Attorney
Jim Garrison, at the suggestion of Louisiana Senator Russell Long, read the Warren Report in its entirety.
The glaring inadequacy of the commission's work led Garrison to his well-known and mostly ridiculed
investigation of the assassination. Though his research uncovered many loose ends and considerable
suggestion of a deep vein of treachery in our own government, Garrison's scream fell primarily on deaf ears
and like the Warren Report dropped quietly into the past.
The question of conspiracy, however, would not go away. Gallup polls taken in the early seventies
showed that nearly 80 per cent of the country believed that Kennedy's assassination was the result of a
conspiracy. Seventy per cent felt the same way about the murder of Martin Luther King. In 1975, House
Representative Henry Gonzalez from Texas called for a Congressional review of the assassinations of
John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and the shooting of George Wallace. There was
great reluctance in the old guard to reopen these cases, but in September of 1976, after a year of feet-
dragging and postponement, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) came into being.
Two years later, during which time several key witnesses to the Kennedy assassination met "accidental"
deaths or committed suicide, and Gonzalez in frustration had quit the leadership of his own committee,
the HSCA quietly concluded there had, in fact, been at least one other gunman involved in the shooting
and that this suggested a conspiracy of unknown order. Even though this meant that at least one assassin
had gotten away scott free, the report was acted on in no way. No arrests were ever made. No further
action was taken. Hardly anyone even seemed to notice or care about the HSCA's incredibly timid
intimations.
The media reaction was, by now, predictable. The Washington Post offered the following
"likelihood" in response to the commission's findings of a "possible conspiracy" and evidence of a
second gunman:
Could it have been some other malcontent who Mr. Oswald met casually? Could not as many
as three or four societal outcastes with no ties to any one organization have developed in some spontaneous
way a common determination to express their alienation in the killing of President Kennedy? It is possible that
two persons acting independently attempted to shoot the President at the very same time.
Despite the proliferation of this bizarre scenario by the media's "coincidence theorists" (or the two
lone nuts in Dealey Plaza theory), the HSCA's modest admission did give serious researchers the hope that
the truth could be found and that maybe there was a way to the bottom of this dark crime.
In the early eighties, English film-maker Nigel Turner produced a stomach turning five-hour
documentary on the assassination. Turner's hypothesis proposed that Kennedy was shot by a trio
of Corsican hitmen hired by forces within the government of the United States. It was aired on the
BBC and included the public's first real glimpse of Abraham Zapruder's home movie, showing the
gruesome fatal shot in nauseating clarity. (It would be ten years before the documentary would be aired
in the United States, though only on secondary television networks.)
In 1989, Jim Marrs published his book Crossfire, possibly the most exhaustive look to
date at the facts of the case. In many ways, this book, along with several others, could be considered the
true fruit of the Select Committee's work. It said what the HSCA had discovered but didn't have the
power or courage to say. In 1991, Oliver Stone produced the movie JFK, based to a large extent on
Marrs' book and Garrison's, On the Trail of the Assassins. For the first time, the general conspiratorial
story involving the CIA, the Mafia, and FBI compliance reached more than just the fringe of our society.
In the wake of this, Congress for the third time was called upon to review the records. In 1992, the same
year Mailer was commissioned to do his book, George Bush signed into law the John F. Kennedy
Assassinations Records Collection Act, known as the JFK Act. The act calls for a five-member board
of reviewers to go through the entire federal archive of the assassination and to open to the public as many
of the presently closed files as they can. This includes the archives of the FBI, the CIA, and the HSCA.
Though, mostly unpublicized, this work is presently progressing as part of Congressional record.
At first glance, it seems that a sincere effort is being made to come to terms with the claims of
conspiracy and to answer the needs of a doubtful public. A closer look suggests that the government is
more likely doing its best to minimize the damage done to its image by Stone's movie and Marrs' book,
watering down the incrimination, pretending to open the archives. A layer deeper, we realize that the
coverup is still going on, though in a subtler more discretionary manner. That in a highly sophisticated
and possibly premeditated way, the truth has been doled out to the public by Congress in ten year bites,
like a watchful parent revealing the facts of life to a child as his maturation allows. But we are not children.
We elected these people. They work for us. We pay them! And in this light, the work of the
Assassinations Record Review Board befouls its own water. An inspection of its guidelines provides
the necessary insight.
In section 6 of the JFK Act, five grounds for postponement of public disclosure are cited.
(That is, the five reasons a file can be kept closed to the public by the review board.) First is that it might
offer a threat to national security by identifying an agent or an intelligence source that is still active in the field.
Second, that it would reveal the name of a person who provided confidential information to the government.
Third, that the matter would "constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy" that would
outweigh the public's need to know. Fourth, that it would "compromise the existence of an understanding
of confidentiality currently requiring protection between a government agent and a cooperating individual
or a foreign government" in such a way that it would outweigh the public's need to know. Fifth, that it
would "reveal a security or protective procedure currently used" by the secret service or some other
government intelligence agency. Again, all of this makes a certain amount of sense, superficially. So let's
skin off another layer or two.
Since its inception, the Assassination Records Review Board, a five member panel selected by
President Clinton and sworn in April 11, 1994, has steadily reviewed documents from the CIA, FBI, and
the House Select Committee on Assassination. For the most part, the documents have been opened entirely.
For the most part. But still certain documents or parts of documents have been withheld and will remain
closed until the year 2017. One must wonder, within the above stated legal guidelines of disclosure, exactly
what could be buried in the JFK archives that must still be kept secret after all these years? One must labor to
find solid grounds for any secret that is more valuable to national security than the presently failing trust of the
people. There is no present imminence of war. The Soviet Union is dissolved. China is not a threat. The world
has changed. Terrorism and civil unrest are the new problems (born of this thing we now address--distrust),
not strategic war. It is time for whatever long buried skeletons that remain in the closets of the intelligence
community to come out. Lack of trust weighs more heavily on our people than any supposed specter of
enemy infiltration, any confidentiality, any single agent in the field, any fear of double or triple agents gaining
access to our war chest of secrets--especially any that existed in the 1960's. The trust of the people out
weighs all other factors.
So again, what could they be hiding that is so sensitive? That the CIA is run by bunch of bunglers?
The strength of J. Edgar Hoover's hand in American Politics? The real horror of the Cointelpro blitz? The
shenanigans that surround the Bay of Pigs intrigue? That CIA super-agent Robert Maheu arranged an
assassination attempt on Castro with Mafia hitman? No. All of this is historical record already. (And, oh,
could there really be anything at all to hide if Oswald was a lone assassin?)
Excepting hyperspace aliens, this writer can only imagine two conceivable reasons that would prevent
every document from being opened to the public right now. First would be that organized crime played a
significant part in the assassination. Yes, national security would indeed be in jeopardy if we were told that
organized crime engineered a political coup in 1963; because that same organization would surely still be in
place today, if only more legitimized by the power it gained by that coup. Second would be that our own
intelligence community, backed by corporate feudal lords and/or the Military Industrial Complex, was
responsible for Kennedy's death. And again national security wavers here--due to fear of a populist
revolt--because that intelligence community still presides in the shadows with unknown quantities of influence.
(What was it those militia men were telling Senator Arlen "Magic Bullet" Specter during those
hearings in the Spring of 1995?) Both of these ugly possibilities are strongly suggested by the information
gathered in the thirty years since the act. And in some ways, these two reasons are one, because if we look
closely at the nature of the beast, there is but the subtlest difference between the intelligence community fringe
and organized crime. The Iran-Contra scandal was not an abberation, but simply business as usual. Drugs for
guns is the modus operandi of the real terrorism that grips and controls not just this country but the
entire globe.
So now we near the sorts of things that can not be revealed to the American public--probably for
fear of revolution! Yes, just as Lyndon Johnson informed Earl Warren that a Third World War could very
likely result if Oswald was not found to be a lone assassin--and quickly, the Assassination Record Review
Board today finds the specter of secession weighing in their scales as they contemplate the names of certain
agents, certain types of information gathering, special protection methods, and the confidentiality of certain
witnesses, because many of these agents are underworld associates, much of this information gathering is
through mafia drug networks, and many of these confidants are mob linked. Fraternizing with and hiring
hoods and drug dealers and gun runners are part of the dark game our intelligence community plays. In fact,
the intelligence community is so riddled with criminal contact on its outer edges, it is frightening to imagine,
much less know, what goes on at the center. The Iran-Contra scandal was just a tiny glimpse. It would kill
us to know the extent to which fascist and underworld interests of fifty years ago thread through the
corporate/intelligence world of today. We live in an age of deceit.
So why would anyone want to jump back into the morass of lies and suspicions surrounding the
assassination of John F. Kennedy? Because it is as a good place as any to start the retelling of American
history since the Second World War. Because in this so-called information age, information means
absolutely nothing if it is based upon a boldface lie--or, more accurately, a nest full of boldface lies.
How can democracy work if the public is informed through half-truths and disinformation? There is an
important lesson to be learned here. There is a necessary level of innocence to be advanced through for
the sake of a maturing democracy. Because, yes, the sad, sad truth is that the coverup worked. The act
has been successfully removed to the realm of history. It has become an abstract thing, filled with names
of individuals that are either dead or long gone from the scene. Unfortunately, however, the organizations
and the ugly network of intelligence that moved those pawns into place most certainly do still remain in some
form or another.
So, once again, why would a large media syndicate publish a book about Lee Harvey Oswald, a
book written by one of America's most visible and respected writers, and then put that book on the cover
of New York Times Book Review? Why does this book come out now? Containing its suspect message?
Even more, what does the mere presence of this book--ignore the content--tell us about our world and
ourselves?
Look at this book as an artifact of our times. It represents a terrible knot, an unknown, a boiling
unsolved crime perpetrated thirty-two years ago that resides at the center of the collective being and spirit
of our country--possibly the entire world. Unresolved, like a spoiled relationship unclosed, tattering in time,
we proceed into the twenty-first century with an unhealing wound at the heart of our group psyche.
A wound still bleeding and eating at the core of what we once called the American Dream. Every moment
that this wound is left undressed, every moment the federal archives are left partially closed, we deny,
even dismantle, the ideal of democracy in America.
