Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery.

Mr. Cohen's essay ``Yes, Oswald Alone Killed Kennedy'' appeared in Best American Essays: 1993.

AFTER living nearly three years in the USSR, Lee Harvey Oswald  -- accompanied by Marina, his Russian wife, and their infant child -- returned by boat to America in early June of 1962. During that trip Oswald jotted down a kind of political testament, using the stationery of the Holland - America line, and Norman Mailer offers one passage from those notes as a proof-text for his thesis that President Kennedy's (probably) lone assassin was a solipsistic anarchist cum nihilist, who was ultimately oblivious to the myriad conspiratorial sirens close about him who may have tried to lure him into their service. With stoic intensity and with an idealistic ruthlessness reminiscent of the great-souled heroes and anti-heroes whom he had studied -- Lenin, Mao, Hitler, Castro -- Oswald tried to forge a new world single-handedly by murdering the most vibrant living symbol of the old. ``I wonder what would happen,'' he wrote, ``if someone would stand up and say he was utterly opposed not only to the government, but to the people, to the entire land and complete foundation of his society.''A novel theory (and very much a novelist's theory), which I shall comment on, but first let me point out that according to one of Mailer's principal sources, Edward Jay Epstein -- whose ``landmark'' book Legend Mailer praises to the skies -- this passage was actually dictated to Oswald by a Russian-speaking agent on the ship who was further coaching him in the legend of the dreadfully unhappy, highly erratic, suicidally unstable, murderously impulsive, lonely leftist nut that the Soviets created as cover for their operative. Indeed, according to Epstein, everything of significance that Oswald ever wrote was a KGB concoction: his letters seeking readmission to the United States, his ``Historic Diary'' (on which Mailer relies heavily), the detailed notes he prepared on life in the Soviet Union (which Mailer includes in a long appendix to support his notion that Oswald was an extremely intelligent observer and critic of the Soviet system), the Holland - America notes, which were found, and apparently were intended to be found, among Oswald's effects after the assassination.Clearly, Epstein's view of Oswald and Mailer's are mutually exclusive, or so it would seem. Furthermore, there could not be a more devastating factual disproof of Epstein's thesis than is inferable from the impressive Russian section of Mailer's book, which is based on many new interviews with co-workers, friends, sweethearts, KGB observers, and high officials, and on many declassified KGB documents detailing the unrelenting human and electronic surveillance of Oswald's every movement and intimate conversation while in Russia. In this small mountain of evidence there is not a hint of anything supporting Epstein's surmise. The picture of Oswald in Russia revealed by Mailer's new evidence shows a surprisingly inept, somewhat lazy, irresolute, romantic, intellectually banal homebody and fantasist, whom the understandably suspicious Russians finally found to be boringly unsuspicious.It is not only Epstein's theory that is blown out of the water by Mailer's Russian research (or, to be more precise, by the research of Mailer's team of researchers, who seem to have supplied him with nearly everything he knows) but the theories of hundreds of conspiratorial speculators who have found cabalistic signs of intrigue in every alleged detail of Oswald's stay in the Soviet Union. And when Mailer takes the story to America, leading us ``kaleidoscopically,'' as he puts it, out of Oswald's meticulously examined marriage and his frenetic activities right up to the murder, he demolishes (as have others before him) many of the major theories of the conspiracists.Aficionados will appreciate the significance of Mailer's (always hedged, but palpable) conclusions that Oswald probably had no significant contact with David Ferrie (a key player in most scenarios) or with the Mob; that he had no contact with anti-Castro Cubans except those he himself intentionally staged for his own singular reasons; that speculations involving Guy Bannister and George DeMohrenschildt finally lead nowhere; that whether or not rogue elements in the CIA and/or rogue elements in the FBI contemplated using him for their roguish purposes, he was always his own man, himself using them, if indeed there was an actual ``them''; that there is nothing suspicious about the failure of the Dallas police and other inquisitors to tape-record Oswald's interrogation after the arrest; that the famous photographs of Oswald armed with rifle and pistol and holding copies of the Trotskyist Militant and the Communist Daily Worker are not forgeries created to frame him.I particularly admire Mailer's sweet appreciation of Ruth Paine, Marina's magnificent friend, who, logically, must be a sinister player in any theorized conspiracy. It was on her initiative that Oswald got the job at the Book Depository, from which he killed the President. (Actually, Oswald took the job three weeks before the decisions were made that brought the President to the doorstep of his assassin.) If Ruth Paine is noble beyond peradventure or suspicion (which is how Mailer portrays her) a major link in the narrative chain leading to an alleged conspiracy is severely weakened.Why then does Mailer seem so reluctant to highlight his most potent finding: that one man, Oswald, an isolated little titan, did it all? Annoyingly, he constantly waffles, maintaining deniability like some cautious President, dallying with familiar conspiracy conjectures only to then worm out of them.Furthermore, why does he profess admiration for views of the assassination diametrically opposite to his own -- such as Epstein's, and Carl Oglesby's ``brilliant'' theory of a coup d'etat considerably more convoluted than the one posited by Oliver Stone? Thus Mailer subtly denigrates the secondary sources that buttress his own conclusions and from which, indeed, he has openly appropriated (and paid for!) nearly every factual detail, gobs of prose, and many of the interpretations in his account of Oswald in America. For instance, he accepts every detail of Gerald Posner's meticulous demonstration (in Case Closed) that Jack Ruby could not have been party to a conspiracy to kill Oswald and then, with an ingenuity rivaling that of the O. J. Simpson defense team, wrenches those very facts into a tour de force of conspiracy speculation in which he claims that Ruby might still have been under Mob orders to rub out Oswald (the Mob having mistakenly assumed that the killing had been arranged by some rogue element of itself), that Ruby ran away from those do-it-or-else orders, and that he then fatalistically obeyed them when, against all reasonable expectations, he accidentally bumped into Oswald.And, of course, there is the now obligatory trashing of the Warren Commission. Mailer does not have the decency to ponder why the conclusions of the Warren Report, in the big picture, are very similar to his own.The most important explanation of these annoying features is Mailer's idea of the role of the novel and of himself as novelist. Throughout his career, Mailer has affected the Emersonian stance of the ``transparent eyeball,'' the great-souled writer through whom radiate all the contradictory currents of his Age, and who, therefore, need only consult the encyclopedia of his own protean Self to understand and to convey the world.Moreover, notwithstanding his remarkable ability to imbibe and render huge amounts of technical and detailed information, Mailer basically has little respect for the independent power of factual truth, as he openly proclaims several times in Oswald's Tale: ``There are no facts -- only the mode of our approach to what we call facts.'' I was astonished by his cavalier dismissal of the question of how many assassins were firing at Kennedy as irresolvably complex, when one would think that a substantial part of his thesis depended on a clear answer to that, as a matter of fact, very answerable question.For Mailer it is not the historians and scientists who can instruct us on these matters, but the literary artists, who command solely by the capacity of their tales to inspire imaginative assent. There are no ``solutions'' to the mysteries of life and history, only narrative explorations. Epstein and Oglesby then aren't really ``wrong'': they are artistic colleagues. (But then neither would the Warren Commission be wrong, and Mailer's criticism that it failed to study the matter deeply enough to resolve the mystery is made in bad faith.)ONE wishes Mailer had said frankly what Don DeLillo said in his novel about Oswald, Libra: ``Because this book makes no claim to literal truth, because it is only itself, apart and complete, readers may find refuge here.'' But Mailer's is a far grander literary conceit: he propounds the preposterous notion that the nation has gone into spiritual decline because no artist-king has given it a myth of its loss in which the magnitude of the soul of the killer matches that of his victim: ``So long as Oswald is a petty figure, a lone twisted pathetic killer who happened to be in a position to kill a potentially great President . . . America is cursed with an absurdity.'' ``Historical absurdity . . . breeds social disease.'' If he can make his novelistic account succeed, by a kind of sheer artistic will-to-power, America will be rescued -- by Norman Mailer, would-be artistic prime minister of the world.Again Mailer is tilting here against the Warren Commission, and assuming a single assassin. But a graver mythic challenge comes from the camp of the conspiracists, who propose a much punier Oswald and a universe of far more pungent absurdities. DeLillo, who found in the assassination of Kennedy exemplification, if not precisely verification, of the fictional world he had constructed in all his previous work, is the deeper rival.In this version, the President was finally killed by a concatenation of plots, all of which, as in many DeLillo novels, turn out differently from the way they were originally intended. Indeed the very notion of realized intention is anathema here. A rogue element of the CIA, angry at a Kennedy who has abandoned his efforts to depose or assassinate Castro, plans an unsuccessful assassination attempt which will be accompanied by bogus proofs that Castro has tried to kill our President. The nation's zeal to remove Castro will be rekindled. Needed are gunmen to enact the mock assassination and to escape. And that brings the rogue element into contact with other on-going conspiracies: anti-Castro fanatics in New Orleans, right-wing Kennedy-haters, Mafia types.Then a rogue element of the rogue element decides that it will not be enough that the mock assassins shoot and escape -- a would-be assassin, a patsy, should be caught.Enter Oswald. He is the quintessential figure in a DeLillo novel: a plaything of mysterious forces that have incoherently shaped his life, protean in his susceptibilities, and miraculously appropriate for the job. The ``deep coincidences,'' as DeLillo terms them, and the plot twists metastasize.DeLillo's lesson is this: We are all helpless patsies, buffeted by unfathomable systems upon systems. We are left with the bottomless suspicions of the public paranoid who avers, as one of the voices in Libra puts it, that ``something else, something that jerks you out of the spin of history,'' is behind everything.As we have seen, Mailer is not entirely free of this post-modern fustian. But when his book is most what it is striving to be, it presents a refreshingly old-fashioned countermyth to the conspiracists -- again, an Emersonian countermyth, of history made by singular intention and triumphant effectiveness. His Oswald is entirely his own man, and the assassination is entirely his doing. Effectively summarizing the best that has been learned and said about Oswald -- his savage marriage, his waxing and waning sexuality, his possible homosexuality, his quotidian fecklessness, his rages and brutality, his tenderness, his monstrous mother, his overweening resentment, his utter isolation -- Mailer draws a beautifully nuanced, touchingly human being. Oswald's dyslexia has been written of before, but no one has conveyed the metaphor of private eloquence within public bumbling to such powerful effect. Mailer's Oswald is, of all things, highly intelligent, even something of an intellectual, as we are convinced by the author's clever decoding of Oswald's dreadfully spelled and ungrammatical prose.Most original of all, Mailer, as usual reminded of himself, sees the imperial passion, the titanic hubris, of Oswald's sense of his historical mission. (Oswald once told Marina that one day he would be prime minister of the world, a fact Mailer somehow missed.) Mailer sees the contingency and coincidence, too: if Oswald had succeeded in his earlier project of killing the right-wing fanatic General Edwin Walker, who, he said, was a budding Hitler; if Ruth Paine had not gotten him a job in a building right next to the President's route; if the other workers on the sixth floor had stayed there to watch the President; if Marina had not feigned another headache the night before; if Oswald had missed or only wounded the President, as Hinckley only wounded Reagan -- there would have been no book, no Oswald. But on the other hand, a lesser man would not have been waiting with his rifle, would not have shot, and that imperial passion is the cause of causes; in that regard, Mailer is right on target.However it is not countermyths in a world conveyed as mythic to its core that are needed to cure us of this assassination. Americans can survive a quotidian Oswald. We can survive contingency. What is needed is artists and historians who restore confidence in a world of public fact and Aristotelian logic. A world where phony possibilities are excluded by empirical study, contradiction is a scandal, and reasonable doubt is earned by rational analysis and is not the same as any old doubt, any imaginable possibility, no matter how brilliant. On these scores, Oswald's Tale fails to be what it could have been.