95.18

“Mailer on Oswald: ‘An American Mystery.’” Article by Joan Smith. San Francisco Examiner, 22 May, Sec. B (“Style”), pp. 1, 3. In this report on his appearance in a City Arts and Lectures program with Wendy Lesser, editor of Threepenny Review, Mailer discusses his collaboration with Lawrence Schiller on 95.16, his former status as a conspiracy theorist, and his ideas about Oswald’s character. Mailer says Oswald was “a psychopathic liar,” but he respects him for his guts, concluding by saying, “John Updike once said of the Kennedy assassination that it was as if God had removed his sanction from America….It’s as if all the troubles have come to us since then, as if we were no longer a blessed nation.”