The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/The Crime of His Time: Difference between revisions

It is as if by redeeming Oswald as a man of deep and compelling character he can redeem all of us who have suffered for the crime. He nets it out even further in the next paragraph:

But that, in the end, is just what Oswald was. And what Mailer does manage to show us through both volumes of ''Oswald’s Tale'', I would suggest, is that this character who was unhappy with the American capitalist system, turned out to be equally unhappy with the Soviet socialist system, as he would have been with the Cuban revolution-oriented system, had he ultimately been allowed to emigrate there as he wished. And that is why Mailer cannot make ''Oswald’s Tale'' into ''The Executioner’s Song'', no matter how much effort, no matter how much detail he puts into it.

Take into account the coincidence of Oswald being fired from a job he liked and securing a lesser position at the Texas School Book Depository and then, as Mailer quotes Priscilla Johnson McMillan:

If you add to that Oswald’s well-established frustrated romantic overtures on the night of November 21 to a wife who is no longer living with him and the anger and despair that might have engendered in an already angry and desperate individual, then you come to appreciate the kind of karmic capriciousness through which history often declares itself. This moment was Oswald’s one last desperate stab at “normal” life and love, and Marina rebuffed him. In Mailer’s universe, everyone is searching—vainly—for love, and if they don’t find it in one form, they’ll pursue it in another. As one per- son close to the investigation put it to me in a decidedly earthy syllogism, “If Oswald had gotten laid on Thursday night, JFK would have gotten laid on Friday night.”

Mailer just can’t resist the temptation of the conspiracy theory—the better angel of any decent thriller novelist but a minefield for a non-fiction reporter. He indulges in all manner of wild speculation in an ongoing exer- cise that is akin to, and has roughly the same odds of success as, trying to prove who wrote Shakespeare’s plays. Dragging in the possibility that Oswald was an FBI informer, for example, even though there is no evidence to sup- port it, is to cast the speculative net so wide that it loses any semblance of logic or appearance of serious investigation. We wade through a morass of “could haves,” “would haves” and “might haves” that go so far as to suggest Oswald’s homosexuality through the body position of a murdered fellow Marine that there is no evidence Oswald had anything to do with. I can imagine Mailer delighting at the very premise.

In the end, Mailer is willing to conclude that Ruby acted out of a combination of genuine admiration for President Kennedy, compassion for Jackie and wanting to save her the trauma of an Oswald trial, and as a response to the vitriolic ad in the ''Dallas Morning News'' that had welcomed Kennedy to Dallas. That ad had been taken out by a Jewish member of the John Birch Society named Bernard Weissman and suggested that the president was a Communist supporter. Ruby was appalled when he saw the ad and fretted that it tarnished the entire Jewish community of Dallas. Mailer quotes Posner:

Though it is painful to admit, the sad fact is that John F. Kennedy was killed by a no-count loser who becomes significant only in his perverse luck and once-in-his-life effectiveness in destroying our collective hopes and

dreams.

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