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 {{Byline|last=Dahlby |first=Tracy |abstract=Norman Mailer’s method of journalism illustrates how to extend the quality and scope of journalistic inquiry into the future of a troubled tradition. In examining Lee Harvey Oswald, Mailer produces a book that is long, intricately built and absorbing, if in places marred by familiar bits of Mailer’s hyper-rational exuberance. What is particularly noteworthy at this time of media upheaval are the tips Mailer’s method offers students and other aspiring investigators about how to extend the quality and scope of journalistic inquiry into the future of a troubled tradition. |url=https://prmlr.us/mr03dah }}
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 It is too early to tell precisely where this Darwinian process of media selection is headed, but the case for epistemological autophagy is building and nowhere more acutely than in journalism today. Fine old newspapers (and some admittedly not so fine) are either dying outright or degrading costly vital functions such as investigative reporting and long-form storytelling to stay in business while advertisers and readers head for the digital hills. Meanwhile, writes Maggie Jackson in a recent number of Neiman Reports, “A new hypermobile, cybercentric and split-focused world has radically changed the context of news consumption.”{{sfn|Jackson|2008|loc=pars. 2–3}} In her view, the Internet’s “rising data floods” put the national attention span at such risk of chronic distraction that Jackson asks,
-{{quote|If this continues to be the way we work, learn and report, could we be collectively nurturing new forms of ignorance, born not from a dearth of information as in the past, but from an inability or an unwillingness to do the difficult work of forging knowledge from the data flooding our world? {{sfn|Jackson|2008|loc=par. 10}} }}
+{{quote|If this continues to be the way we work, learn and report, could we be collectively nurturing new forms of ignorance, born not from a dearth of information as in the past, but from an inability or an unwillingness to do the difficult work of forging knowledge from the data flooding our world?{{sfn|Jackson|2008|loc=par. 10}} }}
 You can imagine Mailer’s ghost chortling at the proposition that new forms of human ignorance might be available for the inventing, but the serious point is this: The hard business of mapping the contours of our society and ourselves is only possible when we try to go in deep. And in a time of information anarchy, that calls for storytellers with the chops to deliver narrative messages in ways that show us the mountain that molehills of information can add up to when crafted with sustained energy and focus.
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 {{quote|We ought to know Oswald well enough by now to understand how demoralized he was by working in a radio factory. To labor collectively was the essence of anonymity. The finished product had more importance than his own person. He had not voyaged from the Marine Corps to the Soviet Union in order to become anonymous. If to work with no enthusiasm would attract more attention, then, indeed, he would put his feet on the table. . . . [H]e dramatizes his presence by going to sleep.{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=408}} }}
-. . .
+Behold the American pill in a Tolstoyan depth of field and he becomes the sum of polar opposites; alternately bullying and charming, angry and cloying, he is not merely a royal pain in the rear but a world-class grievance collector in whom outraged self-importance is at war with a timid soul, a conflict that generates the chthonic power Oswald uses to jerk around both Soviet and American governments to get what he wants. Who is Lee Harvey Oswald? Knowing what we now know, Mailer pegs him:
+{{quote|Oswald was a secret agent. There is no doubt about that. The only matter unsettled is whether he was working for any service larger than the power centers in the privacy of his mind. At the least, we can be certain he was spying on the world in order to report to himself. For, by his own measure, he is one of the principalities of the universe.{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=352}}}}
+Understanding the primacy of Oswald’s personality in the equation make his politics easier to parse. When the Russian failure to appreciate his inner superman prompts Oswald to give up on Minsk and return to Texas, he goes to work translating his bruised self-regard into a political manifesto. Steaming home across the Atlantic, with Marina in tow (unhappy but buoyed by visions of American life gleaned from the movie ''Oklahoma!'' she saw in Minsk), Oswald demonstrates his intent “to come back to America with an even deeper sense of apocalyptic purpose: He will improve the nature of both societies.”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=301}} After all, who better understands the dark heart of superpower hegemony? Oswald, at least in his own mind, is your man:
+{{quote|True democracy can be practiced only at the local level. While the centralized state, administrative, political, or supervisory functions remain, there can be no real democracy. . . . I have lived under both systems. I have ''sought'' the answers, and although it would be very easy to dupe myself into believing one system is better than the other, I know they are not.{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=302}} }}
+Thus Mailer ends Volume One having achieved his goal of painstakingly establishing “a base camp on the slopes of . . . [the Oswald] mystery,”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=349}} even as Oswald has created his own less stable platform for scaling the massif of personal ambition. A master at plucking the telling anecdote from great
+heaps of materials, Mailer leaves us with the fleeting gem of an image that encapsulates the neediness of Oswald’s interior journey: When he and Marina arrive at Love Field in Dallas in June of 1962, Lee is crushed there are no reporters waiting to record the historic event.
+Before going on to Volume Two, it is worth noting how what Mailer likes to refer to as “prodigious” work of the kind he is engaged in in ''Oswald’s Tale'' relates to our age of epistemology-''lite''. To appreciate Mailer’s prodigiousness, simply go online and enter the search “Lee Harvey Oswald.” Immediately, you are inside a crossfire of Web links pointing at all aspects of Oswald’s life—in Dallas, in New Orleans, his childhood, his stint in the Marines, his Italian-made Carcano rifle, his own killing by mob hanger-on Jack Ruby, and on and on. And that is when the reporter-within gets that sinking feeling: It’s going to take months or years, not minutes or hours, to synthesize the available information in a way that might shape a genuine understanding of the topic. To complete the point Maggie Jackson made earlier about split-focus, the way we often live now, increasingly obliged to surf the Net to establish our own context, or no context at all, depending on the amount of energy we invest, doesn’t approximate what the author is doing in ''Oswald’s Tale''—not by a long shot—because it trends toward fragmentation, not synthesis. So here is the question: If newspapers are truly dying, book publishers survive largely by churning out twaddle, and we rely on the Internet for the news of the world rendered in drive-by summaries, who among us is doing the epistemological heavy-lifting that fosters the kind of inquiry essential to our intellectual stability as a society? As Eduardo Porter recently pointed out in ''The New York Times'':
+{{quote|Reporting the news in far-flung countries, spending weeks on investigations of uncertain pay-off, fighting for freedom of information in court—is expensive. Virtually the only entities still doing it on the necessary scale are newspapers. Letting them go on the expectation that the Internet will enable a better-informed citizenry seems like a risky bet.{{Sfn|Porter|2009|loc=par. 14}} }}
+What do the survival of newspapers have to do with the production of book-length nonfiction investigations on the order of ''Oswald’s Tale''? Partly this: Newspapers and magazines have long served as the farm-team organization for our tradition of letters, helping to train or sustain everybody from Walt Whitman and Ida Tarbell to Betty Friedan and Tom Wolfe, while inculcating Americans into a serious reading habit along the way. A new literary feeder system may well emerge in digital form but until we see its clear outlines taking shape, it is worth restating the question: How do we penetrate the mysteries of our world without a serious-minded structure to sustain the effort?
+===The Hinge of Critical Thinking===
+Critics have complained that Volume Two of ''Oswald’s Tale'', which examines Oswald’s life and times in America, contains “nothing new,”{{sfn|Powers|1995|loc=par. 18}} relying as it does on well-trampled documents such as the twenty-six volume Warren Commission report on the Kennedy assassination. Even Mailer acknowledges that his role here shifts to that of an “usher” who guides us to existing materials. But the real point, it seems to me, is that Mailer does the job in a mostly shrewd and illuminating way (prodigious work I only came to truly appreciate, by the way, after prodigiously reading the book, slowly, for a second time). First, he reminds us as any good journalist might, that we need to be on guard against self-bamboozlement: We may know Oswald better than we did before we followed him in Minsk but we haven’t yet laid a glove on the main-event questions: “Did Oswald kill President Kennedy? And, if so, did he do it on his own or as part of a conspiracy?”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=349}}
+That takes us to Dallas, Fort Worth and New Orleans mainly and, Mailer warns that the territory is fraught with tactical peril:
+{{quote|‘Oswald in Minsk’ depended upon the integrity of the interviews, and they revealed a simple if surprising phenomenon—the memories of most of our subjects were clear even though thirty years had passed. After the assassination, they had been instructed by the KGB not to speak about Oswald or Marina, and indeed, they did not. So, their recall was often pristine; it had not been exposed to time so much as sealed against it.{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=350}} }}
+In America, by contrast, the Oswald story is wicked old, and it is a maxim in the reporting trade that however sincere, helpful or passionate the people closest to events might seem, their stories generally become less trustworthy in proportion to the frequency with which they have told them. In this case, witnesses by the score—Oswald’s neighbors and coworkers, retired FBI agents, cops and Russian and Cuban émigrés—have long since claimed stakes in the great dark drama and stand by to deliver their lines for the umpteenth time. How to avoid this slough of polluted source material?
+Once again, Mailer follows his journalistic gut. Despite his disdain for the Warren Commission report, by far the most encyclopedic reservoir of material at hand, but which as a piece of investigation Mailer derides for having all the integrity of “a dead whale decomposing on a beach,” the author manfully holds his nose to reexamine the carcass. And indeed, looking at it from a new angle, Mailer discovers value; the report can “be honored” in pieces, he says, “for its short stories, historical vignettes, and vast cast of characters . . . that do make some attempt to cut tracks through the wilderness surrounding Oswald’s motives.”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=351}}
+Artful “ushering” of such nuggets, in turn, helps illuminate questions about Oswald’s character quirks that arose in Minsk. We learn from a neighbor lady in Fort Worth, Mrs. Murret, for example, that as a boy Oswald’s mother, Marguerite, {{" '}}trained Lee to stay in the house. . . .{{' "}} while she was at work, {{" '}}[so] he just got in the habit of staying alone{{' "}}{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=359}} Oswald’s half-brother, John Pic, says Oswald slept in his mother’s bed until he was at least ten years old.{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=360}} And through the eyes of Evelyn Strickman, a psychiatric social worker, we see there is “a rather pleasant, appealing quality about this emotionally starved, affectionless youngster,” now a teenage truant cutting classes to hang out at the Bronx Zoo,{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=365}} this in contrast to Marguerite Oswald, who Strickman finds {{" '}}a snob{{' "}} overly concerned about the development of Lee’s genitals. {{" '}}When I indicated we had found nothing the matter with his genitals,{{' "}} she testifies, {{" '}}she then looked at once relieved and, I felt, a little disappointed,{{' "}}{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=367}}
+When Pic suggests that Oswald had joined the Marines to escape Marguerite’s “yoke of oppression,”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=378}} we are not surprised to hear from Mailer that “this mother’s boy, over-loved and much neglected”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=381}} has a rough time of it in the Corps. Fellow Marines harp on Oswald’s “feminine characteristics,”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=380}} call him “shit-bird”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=381}} and eventually goad him into firing “a pistol into the wall while a few Marines standing nearby were riding him mercilessly.”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=383}} Mailer’s re-reporting of Oswald’s struggle with his sense of manhood breaks little new factual ground but does lead to a poignant observation about the context of times when such issues became a compelling motif for many young men terrified by homosexual inclinations and ready to go to great lengths to combat and/or conceal them. . . . In the mind-set of the 1950s, a century away from the prevailing concepts of the 1990s, to be weak among men was to perceive oneself as a woman, and that, by the male code of the times, was an intolerable condition for a man.{{sfn|Mailer|1995|pp=379–381}}
+Sad to say, not all of Mailer’s speculations are nearly so well grounded. One signpost that we are entering terra incognita is the author’s insistence that “a mystery of the immense dimensions” demands the invention of “a peculiar form of non-fiction, since not only interviews, documents, newspaper accounts, intelligence files, recorded dialogues, and letters are employed, but speculations as well.”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=353}} A little of the old Maileresque razzle-dazzle aside, the idea that the use of speculation is somehow unique to the author’s enterprise is a bit much. The fact is that all good reporters use the tool of speculative thought as an intellectual exercise, to stretch and explore the boundaries of argument, as they work over their accumulating material; it is only by raising such questions that we deepen our understanding of the story at hand.
+The big difference in ''Oswald’s Tale'' is the degree to which Mailer is willing to push beyond facts or plausibility and to do so in print. The effect is not unlike holding your breathe as you watch a downhill skier skirt deadly objects as he pushes his speed to the max; the process is thrilling to behold but you do worry about loss of control. Take Mailer’s attempt to build a case for Oswald having been recruited as intelligence operative while serving as a Marine radar technician at Atsugi airbase in Japan in the late 1950s. Yes, Oswald ''could'' have been approached by Japanese communists, as Mailer says;{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=388}} he ''could'' have paid for his eventual defection trip to Moscow “by selling secrets”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|pp=400–401}} to them; and his possible relationship with a bar hostess at a high-priced Tokyo night club ''could'' have introduced him to a shadowy bazaar involving “the pursuit and purchase of pieces of military information.”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|pp=389–390}} And in the view of someone like me, who lived in and reported on Japan in the Cold War 1970s, pigs could have sprouted wings and flown air cover over the Japanese islands, but the fact is that Mailer’s musings are so gauzy and under-reported as to be pretty much useless, if not outright misleading. The simple point is this: ''Oswald’s Tale'' would have been more comprehensively robust had Mailer stuck with his otherwise impressive reportorial instincts and invested a little more shoe leather in tethering his imaginative leaps to reality.
+You would also hate to see students of nonfiction reporting adopt Mailer’s unfortunate, if sporadic lack of transparency with his readers. Mailer believed there is an implied pact between writer and reader that requires the application of sweat equity: I worked hard, now you work hard too (“An interview”). Excellent principle! Yet it is one thing to make your readers work for their meaning; it is quite another to arbitrarily hide information from them that in the hiding makes the meaning unnecessarily obscure. For instance, Mailer waits until halfway through his 800 pages to tell us that Stepan Vasilyevich, the intriguingly complex KGB agent in Minsk, is a pseudonym. Would it have hurt the literary merits of the story had Mailer squared that fact with readers up front and before we grew to respect if not admire “Stepan’s” meticulous dedication to his inspector’s craft? Yes, it is a small misstep perhaps, but the inquiring reader grows suspicious: Okay, and what else aren’t we being told? Mailer then creates a composite character named “General Marov” from three separate KGB sources who he says did not want to be identified. Having faithfully followed Mailer this far up Mount Oswald, I doubt any serious reader would abandon the quest if the author had referred to these individuals as “sources” and left his advertised respect for the material intact.{{sfn|Mailer|1995|pp=403–404}}
+Fortunately, Mailer gets big things largely right, and his distrust of his own perceptions offers a valuable lesson for prospective toilers in nonfiction. For example, he continues to question whether he knows Oswald as well as he thinks he does or is he fooling himself. Up against a deadline or just weary of the fight, reporters are routinely tempted to throw down anchors in a sea of information. Ah yes, I see where this is going, we tell ourselves—Oswald’s massive ego obviously led him to kill the president as an esteem-boosting grab for glory—and then unwittingly arrange the facts to fit the template. (Doctors say they face the same temptations in making an accurate diagnosis.) In his own case, Mailer confesses that he started ''Oswald’s Tale'' “with a prejudice in favor of the conspiracy theorists” but has forced himself to keep an open mind in order 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.”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=605}}
+Three-quarters of the way through the book, and with Oswald finally poised for his rendezvous with infamy in the fall of 1963, Mailer wonders whether his open-mindedness hasn’t led him into fresh peril:
+{{quote|Hypotheses commence as our servant—they enable us to keep our facts in order while we attempt to learn more about a partially obscured subject. Once the profits of such a method accumulate, however, one is morally obliged . . . to be scrupulously on guard against one’s own corruption. Otherwise, the hitherto useful hypothesis will insist on prevailing over everything that comes in and so will take over the integrity of the project. . . . One can feel such a tendency stirring. It is possible that the working hypothesis has become more important to the author than trying to discover the truth.{{sfn|Mailer|1995|pp=605–606}} }}
+And here is where writerly daring comes in. Mailer fights the urge to jump to a final conclusion (though we detect his knees flexing for the leap) by forcing himself to reexamine all the familiar, pop-culture-encrusted cases for conspiracy. And while that particular business strikes me as something akin to picking up a fistful of sleepy snakes, Mailer’s contract with his reader holds up: We have come to admire our avuncular guide for his capacity to shoulder his reporting weight; we appreciate the insights it has so far produced; and so we willingly trot once again through this boggy patch, coming at last (and once again for many of us, I’d wager) to the conclusion that even though a
+{{quote|formidable number of books have been written by conspiracy theorists examining many a possibility of intelligence activity by and around Oswald ... after all this time, there is no overruling evidence that he was definitely associated with the FBI, the CIA, Army or Navy Intelligence, or any Cuban groups.{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=605}} }}
+Or for that matter with any conspiracy whatsoever. In the end, however, Mailer does his readers the favor of honestly erring on the side of an only partially revealed mystery when he concludes that the chances are three out of four that Oswald acted alone to kill the president. Laying odds might be considered a copout had Mailer not spent so many pages building his case with mostly meticulous care.
+===Conclusion: The Real Cost of Fast Food===
+In January 2003, Mailer appeared on ''The Charlie Rose Show'' to argue that great novels (and presumably merely really good ones too) change “people’s lives in ways they cannot even begin to measure.” And despite his reservations about the practice of the craft, I suspect that today, with traditional journalism chewing off its paws, he would tolerate the idea that good journalism, great journalism, can change America for the better too—and that its absence will have the opposite effect. It is this transformative aspect of nonfiction documentary work and its power to lead us to new ways of knowing that for my money is most significantly on display in ''Oswald’s Tale''.
+Like others before him, Mailer locates the psychological motor that has helped generate endless conjecture over Oswald’s role in the Kennedy assassination in our collective resistance to the idea that an angry pissant like Oswald could by acting alone bring down a king. And until we get beyond that disconnect
+{{quote|we will keep asking who was behind it and which conspiracy was operative. It is virtually not assimilable to our reason that a small lonely man felled a giant in the midst of his limousines, his legions, his throng, and his security. If such a non-entity destroyed the leader of the most powerful nation on earth, then a world of disproportion engulfs us, and we live in a universe that is absurd. So the question reduces itself to some degree: If we should decide that Oswald killed Kennedy by himself, let us at least try to comprehend whether he was an assassin with a vision or a killer without one.{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=198}} }}
+And in pushing that logic forward on the strength of his reporting (and not undisciplined speculation), Mailer is able to decide that Oswald was indeed an assassin with a megalomaniacal vision in which he
+{{quote|would not be shooting at Kennedy because he liked him or disliked him—that would be irrelevant to the depth of his deed. The answer speaks out of our understanding of him: It was the largest opportunity he had ever been offered.{{sfn|Mailer|1995|pp=779–780}} }}
+Thus the perpetrator’s road to his event leads us to questions about ourselves. Whatever collective anger we may still feel over the JFK assassination, Mailer suggests, stems at least in part from the existential confusion that Oswald’s behavior long ago activated in the public mind. Marines “plant flags on Iwo Jima,” he observes; they “do not defect” to Russia. And by showing us how Oswald had “injured one of our Cold War certainties,”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=403}} Mailer reminds us of what it was like to live in America in a time when Hollywood and the news media helped fan anti-communist paranoia, “the American imagination saw a Red menace under every bed”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=723}} and “the leading actors in this tragicomedy of superpowers . . . with limited comprehension, lived in dread of each other.”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=353}} In so doing, he makes an indelible point about what happens when political events pull the curtain on what George Orwell called “the strange mixture of reality and illusion, democracy and privilege, humbug and decency, by which the nation keeps itself in its familiar shape.”{{sfn|Orwell|2005|p=22}} We live with a residual anger about the Kennedy assassination not merely because Oswald killed a popular president but because the act led us to questions about ourselves that were not easy to think about or resolve.
+Mailer’s demonstration of the power by which a malcontent’s apocalyptic vision can shake our sense of who we are is arguably even more poignant today than it was when ''Oswald’s Tale'' was first published, since we are now obliged to look back at Oswald’s actions over the devil’s hump of September 11, 2001. In the aftermath of that event, the TV-dominated and therefore context-challenged commercial news media had challenge aplenty in keeping us focused on what was really important to the public’s understanding and as a result at once informed us about what was happening while simultaneously helping to obscure the deeper motivations of the hijackers and exactly who or what was after us. As Mailer pointed out in his commentary on 9/11, ''Why Are We At War?'':
+{{quote|The United States was going through an identity crisis. Questions about our nature as a country were being asked that most good American men and women had never posed to themselves before. Questions such as, Why are we so hated? How could anyone resent us that much? We do no evil. We believe in goodness and freedom. Who are we, then? Are we not who we think we are? More pressing, who are “they?” What does it all mean?{{sfn|Mailer|2003|pp=10–11}} }}
+One of Mailer’s great talents was his capacity to invoke a sense of universal mystery against which all good questions, journalistic or otherwise, are ultimately asked. And therefore one of my favorite passages in ''Oswald’s Tale'' is a tiny one that has nothing to do with geopolitics or political conspiracy; it comes when Marina Oswald, not having found the ''Oklahoma!'' she sought in America but rather a marriage that propelled her to maximum public humiliation, reflects on a sad, unguarded moment in 1963: “She still thinks of the night Lee sat in the dark on their porch in New Orleans and he was weeping. It was such a heavy burden for him. Something, and she does not know what it was.”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=785}} With all respect to Archibald MacLeish’s classical take on the utility of poetical spareness (“For all the history of grief/An empty doorway and a maple leaf”){{sfn|MacLeish|1967|p=681}} the epigrammatic snapshot here resonates all the more chillingly surrounded as it is by a huge book in which the author has paid his contextual dues. And when Mailer honors the rooting of mystery within context, it confirms a valuable piece of advice for any intellectual adventurer: “It is worth remembering that in life, as in other mysteries, there are no answers, only questions, but part of the pleasure of intellection is to refine the question, or discover a new one.”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|pp=515–516}}
+In his 2003 conversation with Charlie Rose, Mailer argued against what he saw as too much literary product being produced and consumed as fast food. As he told Rose,
+{{quote|A book . . . that’s an absolutely agreeable, fast read, is usually a meretricious book. . . . There’s usually something wrong with the depth of perception . . . It’s kind of like McDonald’s food. We have a huge equivalent of McDonald’s food in the literary world. . . . Most great writers are not easy to read and shouldn’t be.}}
+What Mailer was arguing ''for'' then, it seems to me, was the equivalent of a slow food movement to regulate our epistemological consumption and make us think a little harder about what is going down the pipe. Don’t get me wrong: The digital revolution is a blessing to those who would inform the public; it enables us to get our hands on information that only few years ago would have generally been beyond reach (real-time video corroboration of public misconduct, for one thing), so we can take our stories farther, faster. What the Internet cannot do, however, is the prodigious work required to turn us into more discriminating consumers of context; it is, as we educators not infrequently hear ourselves saying, ''only'' a tool. Yet as any reader of science fiction—or of Norman Mailer—will know, the tool, unchallenged, ultimately imposes its own menu of demands.
 ===Notes===
@@ Line 43: / Line 102: @@
 * {{cite book |last=MacLeish |first=Archibald |date=1967 |chapter=Ars Poetica |title=Seven Centuries of Verse, English and American |editor-last=Smith |editor-first=A. J. M. |url= |location=New York |publisher=Scribner’s  |ref=harv }}
 * {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |title=Acceptance Speech for National Book Foundation Award |url=https://prmlr.us/mr08mail1 |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=2 |issue=1 |date=2008 |pages=219–220 |access-date=2021-06-23 |ref=harv }}
-* {{cite interview |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |subject-link= |interviewer=Charlie Rose |title=An Interview with Norman Mailer |work=The Charlie Rose Show |date=January 29, 2003 |publisher=PBS |location= |url= |access-date= |ref=harv}}
+* {{cite interview |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |subject-link= |interviewer=Charlie Rose |title=An Interview with Norman Mailer |work=The Charlie Rose Show |date=January 29, 2003 |publisher=PBS |location= |url= |access-date= |ref={{SfnRef|Rose|2003}} }}
 * {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1995 |title=Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery |url= |location=New York |publisher=Little, Brown |ref=harv }}
 * {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=2003 |title=Why Are We at War? |location=New York |publisher=Random House  |ref=harv }}
@@ Line 50: / Line 109: @@
 * {{cite web |url=https://shorensteincenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/young_people_and_news_2007.pdf |title=Young People and News |last=Patterson |first=Thomas E. |date=July 10, 2007 |website=Harvard Kennedy School |publisher=Harvard University |access-date=2009-04-12 |quote= |ref=harv }}
 * {{cite news |last=Porter |first=Eduardo |date=February 13, 2009 |title=What Newspapers Do, Have Done and Will Do |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/14/opinion/14sat4.html |work=New York Times |location=Web |page= |access-date=2009-04-12 |ref=harv }}
-* {{cite news |last=Powers |first=Thomas |date= |title=The Mind of the Assassin |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/30/books/the-mind-of-the-assassin.html |work=New York Times |location=Web |page= |access-date=2009-04-18 |ref=harv }}
+* {{cite news |last=Powers |first=Thomas |date=April 30, 1995 |title=The Mind of the Assassin |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/30/books/the-mind-of-the-assassin.html |work=New York Times |location=Web |page= |access-date=2009-04-18 |ref=harv }}
 {{refend}}