Norman Mailer Takes On Nation’s Paranoia and Comes Up With ‘Oswald’

Norman Mailer hunches forward in the small sound booth of a call-in radio show to make a point about the Kennedy assassination.

“The key question, always: Is it conspiracy or is it accident?” he says. To illustrate, Mailer points to a technical glitch that has interrupted his conversations with callers three times.

“One of the iron rules of thumb is that three coincidences make one conspiracy. But I’m willing to believe today that it’s just the telephone line.”

Hmmm. The caller is not so sure. Next thing you know, somebody might be saying it was just a lone gunman who shot Kennedy.

“It seemed to happen both times at the point where you were starting to get to the meat of the matter,” the caller says.

The host tries to offer assurance that They have not been jamming Mailer’s interview, but she is not entirely successful.

“Well, I know enough about radio electronics to know that it could have been done,” the caller replies.

This is familiar landscape for Mailer. Nobody knows paranoia like the chronicler of Marilyn Monroe and Gary Gilmore and the author of what may well become the world’s longest spy novel, “Harlot’s Ghost.”

Now Mailer--actor, novelist, playwright, poet, screenwriter, artist, journalist, social critic, TV commentator and ancien terrible of the American literary scene--has dived into what he calls “the great paranoid myth of all time”: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

“Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery” (Random House) is an 828-page exploration of the life and times of Lee Harvey Oswald. But it is also the story of Mailer’s own odyssey from conspiracy theorist to doubter. After a long stay in Russia with some of the people who knew Oswald best, he now believes that Kennedy’s assassin was never a KGB plant, mole, spy or even fellow traveler. He is not quite so ready to give up the idea of a connection between Oswald and the CIA but, at 72, Norman Mailer has become a reluctant convert to the single-gunman theory.

This month, out dutifully beating the publicity drums for his new book, the white-haired boxing aficionado-literary lion is not quite in fighting trim. A paunch mars the Mailer silhouette, and he wears tiny hearing aids. Nevertheless, he looks good in gray slacks and a double-breasted blue blazer with silver buttons. A publicist ushers one journalist after another into Random House’s Manhattan offices for one 30-minute interview after another, but Mailer appears indefatigable, ever willing to talk.

The decision to take two years out of his life to pursue the story of Oswald, he says, began with a phone call from an investigative reporter named Lawrence Schiller.

“I had worked with Larry on ‘The Executioner’s Song.’ He calls me up; he says, ‘What would you think about doing a book on Lee Harvey Oswald if I can get the KGB file on him?’ And I said, ‘I’m interested for sure.’ It fit in with my selfish interests.”

Those involve “Harlot’s Ghost,” his 1991 novel about the experiences of a middle-level CIA agent. The lengthy novel met with unenthusiastic reviews and disappointing sales, neither of which has dissuaded Mailer from going ahead with plans to write Volume Two.

“In the second half,” Mailer continues expansively, “I want the KGB to figure much more prominently. The only way I knew about them was through Ronald Reagan’s eyes as the Evil Empire. I didn’t have any confidence about how they really functioned, and I certainly had no novelist’s feel for the scene. So this was perfect.”

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The “perfect” arrangement involved spending six months in Minsk, the dreary industrial city where Oswald worked in a radio factory. To pave the way, Schiller impressed upon the KGB agents that “America’s Tolstoy” was descending from the literary mountaintop to talk to them. The agency began handing over surveillance reports and other documents.

Mailer was thus given entree to the banal, tacky world of the Soviet secret police. His account of Oswald’s years in Minsk depicts an expatriate American surrounded by a swarm of informers who dutifully reported his every cough and comma to the KGB.

Mailer and Schiller interviewed the agents who handled Oswald’s case and many of those who knew and informed upon the ex-Marine during his years in Minsk. The two men had a long professional relationship--their work on the Gilmore research produced one of Mailer’s greatest critical and popular successes, “The Executioner’s Song.” Both out-sized characters, they have a collaborative style that sometimes resembles a barroom brawl and occasionally terrified the Russians.

The KGB’s guarantee of complete cooperation turned out to be something less sweeping. Some of those who had informed on Oswald, it turned out, were not pleased to learn that their identities had been disclosed to America’s Tolstoy.

“Working with the KGB was a comedy of ups and downs and ins and outs and stops and starts because the political situation kept changing,” Mailer says. “The early promises from the KGB that we could have the entire Oswald file got squeezed down.”

The files Mailer did get to examine, however, were in their own mundane way astonishing--a crushing rejoinder to two conspiracy theories. The KGB, listening in on Oswald’s life, found a man too inept and undirected to be anybody’s mole. And Mailer, entering into the world of the Minsk KGB, found spies too timid and unimaginative to carry out a Cold War, at least on their own.

His conviction that Kennedy’s murder was very probably the result of a conspiracy dissolved as his research proceeded.

“I went over to Russia with the idea that at the very least, the KGB had debriefed Oswald thoroughly and had entertained the idea of using him as an agent,” Mailer says, sipping tea from a foam cup.

But “by the time Stalin was gone, nobody in the KGB was in a hurry to be too bold, too inventive or too imaginative because you could pay for that with your head. They were very cautious, very conservative people. Their feeling about Oswald was: It’s madness to get involved with this guy, who’s such a screwball.”

Mailer came home in March, 1993, feeling that Oswald probably acted alone--though the author would have been more comfortable in the ranks of the conspiracy buffs.

Long obsessed with the Kennedy presidency, Mailer has often said that Americans yearn for an assassination conspiracy, to assure themselves that such catastrophes can’t be the product of a single, small, insignificant individual’s meaningless outburst of rancor. And anti-communism had taken on a whole new dimension. Not for the first time in his long literary career, Mailer was mad as hell.

“I came back furious at America. I mean, ‘the Evil Empire,’ really. This poor, moribund, Third World country. Yes, it was an oppressive society, but for the average person, it was no more oppressive than working for a corporation. It was like being in the Army at its worst. The days of the Gulag were essentially over.”

It was back in the United States that the Oswald book took a fateful turn. Mailer took about six months to write a draft of Oswald in Russia. He then turned his attention to writing the second half of the book, Oswald in America.

“I thought the second half would only be 100 or 150 pages, sort of an epilogue,” he explains. “But I became more and more interested in the material.”

Mailer, for example, had for years refused to read the Warren Commission report on the assassination because it was “so boring.”

“But now I had an image of [Oswald]. Suddenly I was like a lawyer, and I’m reading about a brief concerning my client in an earlier case. The stuff came alive for me,” he says.

And so, the “epilogue” expanded to an eye-glazing 450 pages that quotes extensively from the Warren report and other sources.

Mailer’s writing career has been nothing if not prolific. He has cranked out 28 books, not to mention a multitude of articles, essays, poems, screenplays and a few ink and pencil drawings.

His craft has changed little over the years. In the age of cyberspace, Mailer still writes out everything in longhand. An assistant punches it into a word processor and gives him printed copy for revisions.

“I’m always having fresh copy handed me each morning. It’s one of the few benefits of getting older and getting closer to that great feared friend of all of us, who is named Al Z. Heimer. My near memory is a burned-out zone. So I read the stuff with the attitude of ‘Who is the idiot who wrote this? This is terrible!’ I go through it and fix it up. I can edit over and over and over, seven, eight, 10 times if it needs it, and it usually does,” he says with a smile.

Critics may have found “Oswald’s Tale” too long by half, but Mailer is still thinking large.

“I figure I’ve got 10 years and three or four big works to do,” he says. “I’m going to do the second half of ‘Harlot’s Ghost,’ and I’ve always wanted to do a novel about a concentration camp, and my publisher wants an autobiography.”