24
edits
User:PLowery/sandbox: Difference between revisions
Done typing. Need to review
(On page 13 of 16) |
(Done typing. Need to review) |
||
| Line 170: | Line 170: | ||
Mailer found no association conspiracy to be sufficiently encompassing, believable, and realistic enough to withstand long and cold scrutiny, and so he allows the answer to gradually emerge from what is palpable, known and understood. | Mailer found no association conspiracy to be sufficiently encompassing, believable, and realistic enough to withstand long and cold scrutiny, and so he allows the answer to gradually emerge from what is palpable, known and understood. | ||
Oswald, without any obvious reason to do so, took steps to provide for his family should he be captured or killed, and Mailer deduced that | |||
<blockquote>In the depths of Oswald's logic lies an equation: Any man who is possessed of enough political passion to reach murderous intensity in his deeds is entitled to a seat at the high table of world leaders. Such may have been Oswald's measure. The route to becoming a great political leader--given his own poor beginnings--might have to pass through acts of assassination.(505)</blockquote> | |||
On April 10, 1963, most likely acting on his own, Oswald tries to kill General Edwin A Walker, head of the ultra-right John Birch Society. | |||
<blockquote>It can be argued that in the course of his preparations, Oswald had scouted the house and knew Walker's habits, but that is not likely. Walker was away on his tour until Monday, April 8, two days before the attempt. The only conclusion, if Oswald managed it by himself, running entirely on his own schedule, is that he went to Walker's house on Wednesday night to shoot him, and there was the General in full collaboration ... Luck! Of course, luck may be the product of extra-sensory perception in crucial areas, and Oswald may be an unhappy example of a man with extraordinary luck.(513)</blockquote> | |||
Oswald's shot misses the mark, but that only bolsters his confidence. Mailer generously quotes Patricia Johnson McMillan, author of ''Lee and Marina,'' on the point. | |||
<blockquote>He had tried something cataclysmic--and he had not been caught. He had not even been touched. | |||
Thus by far the greatest legacy Lee carried out of the Walker attempt was the conviction that he was invulnerable, that he stood at the center of a magic circle swathed in a cloak of immunity. It was a feeling which fitted dangerously with the feeling he already had that he was special, that he had particular prerogatives. He and he alone was entitled to that which was forbidden to everybody else.(qtd. in Mailer 517)</blockquote> | |||
Mailer sees Oswald as a stoic, a narcissist, a futurist, a seeker of utopia, and ultimately, a nihilist. It is to the author's great credit that having employed as much impartiality as he could muster in his examination, he also is able to see Oswald as a human being torn by a choice. "To which half of himself will he be faithful," Mailer asks, "his need for love, or his need for power and fame? What is never taken seriously enough in Oswald is the force of his confidence that he has the makings of a great leader"(555). | |||
Mailer is scrupulous about letting the reader know his own leanings and prejudices, and goes so far as to note that if he embraces them too strongly and follows them too closely, they become more important than finding the truth, so he vows to be on guard against the pull of his own inclinations. In so doing, Mailer creates a journalistic work of great and compassionate charity, a metaphysical favor for the ages. The mark of his genius is to employ Oswald's grandiosity as a balm for us all: | |||
<blockquote>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 ... the sudden death of a man as large in his possibilities as John Fitzgerald Kennedy is more tolerable if we can perceive his killer as tragic rather than absurd.(198)</blockquote> | |||
Mailer confides that before he began the project, he favored conspiracy theory but was determined | |||
<blockquote>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. To study his life in this manner produces a hypothesis: Oswald was a protagonist, a prime mover, a man who made things happen--in short, a figure larger than others would credit him for being.(605)</blockquote> | |||
Mailer concludes not merely that Oswald had the character to kill Kennedy and do it alone, but that the assassination probably was undertaken without any special malice. It was simply an opportunity presented to Oswald by the same Fates that months earlier had served up Gen. Walker, and that just weeks earlier had given him a job at the Texas Book Depository right on the route of Kennedy's motorcade. All that remained was for him to step up, take advantage of the moment and savor the achievement that was meant to be his alone. "For Americans, the aftershocks would not cease for the rest of the century or more. Yet he would also be punishing the Russians and the Cubans. They would suffer side effects for decades to come. But then, he was above capitalism and he was above Communism. Both!" (780). | |||
The last part of Volume Two is titled "Oswald's Ghost," which not by accident also was the title of an "American Experience" documentary which aired on public television in 2008. In the program, Mailer said that to Oswald's way of thinking | |||
<blockquote>If he was caught, well, then he was quite articulate, and he would have one of the greatest trials in America's history, if not the greatest, and he would explain all of his political ideas, and he would become world famous, and might have an immense effect upon history even if he was executed ... Oswald is a ghost who sits upon American life .... What is abominable and maddening about ghosts is that you never know the answer. Is it this, or is it that? You can't know because a ghost doesn't tell you. ("Oswald's" 20)</blockquote> | |||
Perhaps not, but a great novelist does--and so does a great journalist. | |||
::::::Works Cited | |||
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. ''The Sign of Four''. 1890. ''The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes.'' Ed. Leslie S Klinger. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006. 209-382. Print | |||
Hersey, John. "The legend on the License." ''Journalism: The Democratic Craft.'' Ed. G. Stuart Adam and Roy Peter Clark. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 152-163. Print | |||
Hillstrom, Kevin and Laurie Collier Hillstrom. ''The Vietnam Experience: A Concise Encyclopedia of American Literature, Songs, and Films.'' Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998. Print | |||
Jones, Malcolm. "Sentry of a Century; Norman Mailer: 1923/2007." ''Newsweek'' 19 Nov. 2007: 64-5. Print | |||
Mailer, Norman. ''Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery.'' New York: Random House, 1995. Print. "Oswald's Ghost." ''The American Experience.'' PBS. 14 Jan. 2008. Print Transcript. | |||
Pound, Ezra. ''ABC of Reading.'' New York: New Directions, 1934. Print | |||