Word: oswald
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This need to find satisfying villains also explains the endurance of Kennedy-assassination theories. To concede that Lee Oswald could by himself murder a President is to realize that history is significantly random; perversely, it's more reassuring to believe that a confederation of fbi and cia agents, mafiosi, Cubans and Kennedy's autopsy doctors hatched a plot remarkable both for its reach and for the fact that in more than three decades not a single participant has sung. Who were these adroit conspirators? The same men who two years earlier launched the quixotic, inept Bay of Pigs operation...
...Harlot's Ghost, published in 1991, Mailer embarked upon a sort of Moby Dick of the Central Intelligence Agency, with a volume that ran to more than 1,300 pages. A second installment is in progress. Meantime, the industrious Mailer offers Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery (Random House; 828 pages; $30), a kind of nonfiction psychobiography in which he turns his novelist's imagination to the '60s origin myth, John Kennedy's assassination. Oswald's Tale can be judged as investigative journalism or as literature. On either count a fair judgment would be favorable, though mixed. Sunshine and clouds...
...intent of Oswald's Tale," Mailer explains modestly enough, "is not to solve the case--that's beyond my means--but to delineate for the reader what kind of man he was (that is to say, what kind of character Oswald would be in a novel) and thereby enable the reader to start thinking about which plots, conspiracies or lone actions Oswald would have been capable of, as opposed to all the ones he would never...
...Moscow interviewing friends and co-workers who knew the American defector in 1959 and the early '60s, when he worked unhappily in a Soviet radio plant and courted and married Marina Prusakova. Mailer and Schiller also interviewed some of the KGB agents who had the stupefying work of following Oswald around, and they read the KGB transcripts from the electronic bugs installed in the Oswalds' Minsk apartment-the intimacies and banalities of quarreling newlyweds. ("Wife: [yells] ... I'm not going to cook. L.H.O.: You could make cutlets, put on water for tea. I mean, I bought everything, everything...
Mailer's accomplishment--and it is, after all, the purpose he set for himself--is to turn Oswald, that historical smudge, into a troubled, touching human being, rounded and vulnerable and ultimately, Mailer thinks, fatally grandiose: a nut case and nonentity with Hitler-scale dreams. There is perverse American poignancy in the newlyweds' Minsk days, when Lee dreamed of having a son, to be named David, who would grow up to be President...