Open File : Was Oswald’s shot luck, conspiracy, fate or fiction? : OSWALD’S TALE: An American Mystery, <i> By Norman Mailer (Random House: $30; 848 pp.)</i>

The mystery of John F. Kennedy’s assassination belongs to the world of quantum physics, in which nothing is as it seems or even as it is. Paradox is at its heart. Einstein had faith in the relativity theory because the mathematics was so simple; Niels Bohr and Wolfgang Pauli, debating a proposed quantum law before a Danish audience, had an opposite criterion: Bohr interrupting Pauli with the cry, “It’s not crazy enough--it can’t be right!” Pauli retorting, “It is crazy enough!” The problem with the assassination likewise is that any credible solution has to be both crazy and simple.

The simple explanation is that Lee Harvey Oswald was a screwed-up narcissist drawn to violence; by sheer coincidence he was working, in November, 1963, in a building overlooking a presidential motorcade route. More than that, it was the one spot where a tight corner would force the motorcade to slow almost to a halt. The coincidence gave Oswald his one shot at fame--and he took it. Norman Mailer in his gigantic study of Oswald comes close to endorsing this simple explanation; and it has undeniable force. Following an unusual visit to his family the night before the killing, Oswald left money for them, together with his wedding ring. He took to work a long package, which we can assume was his Italian rifle. He had previously tried to shoot the right-wing Gen. Edwin A. Walker. There is no clear-cut evidence that he was mixing either with government intelligence or with Mafia people; generally he was a loner.

But then the inconsistencies pile in. Hunting in Minsk, he couldn’t hit a rabbit from a few feet away. Expert marksmen, post-Dallas, found his rifle-sight badly adjusted; firing without pressure, they could barely emulate his deadly accuracy. What of the crowds certain the shots came from the grassy knoll? (Mailer’s book must be unique in that he does not mention the grassy knoll.) What of the “magic bullet”? The initial Parkland doctors’ verdict that the front wound was an entry-wound? The autopsy sketches, so inaccurate they surely had to be part of a cover-up? The suicides and suspicious deaths, of David Ferrie and George De Mohrenschildt when they had been summoned to give evidence? Jack Ruby’s Mafia-esque shooting of Oswald, and his desperate plea to Judge Warren to move him to Washington where he could tell the truth? Taking account of these factors and a host of others, we conclude that the simple explanation is crazy.

On the other hand, if we build an edifice of conspiracy capable of holding all the uncomfortable crazy details, we find it liable to tumble down because some very simple facts won’t fit in. For example--to take one that bothers Mailer whenever he is drawn to the persuasive conclusion that Oswald was silenced: Why was Ruby wasting time sending money to a female employee, when at any moment Oswald might be moved out of his reach? The crazy explanations are not simple enough; they seem to demand a perfect functioning of intricate movements, which take no account of crass accident. America could not get a few helicopters to Iran to attempt a hostage rescue without a breakdown; yet a network of conspirators killed Kennedy, corrupted the medical and legal investigations and buried the truth, without a hitch.

So we go back to attempting to find a truth simple enough for Einstein, crazy enough for Pauli, and we find . . . the 1995 Norman Mailer model of Oswald; a man with enough dignity to be in the Shakespearean mold that Mailer wants: “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.” It makes a difference to us, Mailer asserts, whether an act of murder is “visionless and mindless or is a cry of wrath that rises from a skewed heart maddened by its own vision of injustice.”

Certainly the Oswald who emerges from Mailer’s long and sometimes rambling exploration is an interesting and complex man. Partly by correcting his dyslexic misspellings, Mailer makes a good case for his having been almost “a young intellectual.” Considering his poor school-record he wrote in a good polemical style. Most unusually for a dyslexic, he was a copious reader. In one summer week in 1963 he borrowed from the public library Kennedy’s “Profiles in Courage,” William Manchester’s biography of the president, Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” Alexander Werth’s “Russia Under Khrushchev” and, for light relief, “Hornblower and the Hotspur.” It strikes this reader as a very congenial, humanist selection, and it’s hard to imagine that particular borrower blowing the President’s brains out, a few months later.

He was a shrewd chess player, a poetic photographer. He loved Tchaikovsky’s opera “The Queen of Spades.” He and his wife, Marina, listening to classical music on the radio and play a game of guessing who the composer was. Often he won. It takes intelligence and sensitivity for a man from a culturally poor background to be able to distinguish Schumann from Wagner--or to want to do it. Earlier, on a troopship, Lee shared with a fellow Marine “Leaves of Grass.” One wonders whether he read and reflected on “O Captain! my captain! our fearful trip is done. . . .” The other Marine, a tough footballer and wrestler, told the Warren Commission that he felt Oswald had a large homosexual tendency. Mailer suggests that Oswald may have been as baffled and frustrated in his sexuality as in his intellect. Marina rarely found him up to scratch in bed, though his main problem, premature ejaculation, hardly suggests aversion.

Drawing on Edward Jay Epstein’s “Legend,” Mailer toys with the possibility that Oswald was involved in a sex crime. A Marine called Schrand was shot to death while on guard duty; some Marines told Epstein they thought Oswald was involved. Mailer makes the imaginative suggestion that Schrand may have been compelling someone (a Filipino? Oswald?) to fellate him. It was a Marine tradition, Mailer asserts. The fellating victim may have grabbed the gun and fired at his tormentor. If Oswald was responsible, in such a scenario--unlikely but conceivable--”what a sense he would have had thereafter of being forever an outlaw, an undiscovered and as yet unprosecuted criminal.”

We are being moved toward a concept of Oswald as Byronic anti-hero. Mailer is excellent on the exalted state of mind Oswald must have been in during the last couple of days before the motorcade. Having pointed out to us Marguerite Oswald’s “full operatic passion” for her son, the author might have reminded us of Oswald’s passion for “The Queen of Spades,” and wondered whether some aria from that tale of an outsider, amoralist and gambler with fate was haunting him as he shot a President he admired.

Before we are carried away totally into romanticism, it is salutary to read the tart report of “Tanya,” of Minsk Intourist, July 8, 1960. She notes that Oswald’s range of interest is limited; that he has a “poor conception of art, music, painting, to say nothing of Marxist-Leninist theory.” She has found in him “a striving to become acquainted with girls, primarily blondes who have a command of English”; he is stingy, capable of dating a girl, then going to a restaurant alone to avoid the expense of paying for her. His privileged flat struck one of his girlfriends, Inna, as neat but sterile. She expected Hemingway, Faulkner or “something forbidden” on his bookshelves, but found only Marx and Lenin in English. In his troubled boyhood, a social worker reported, Lee felt “almost as if there is a veil between him and other people through which they cannot reach him but he prefers this veil to remain intact.” When, on the last day of Lee’s life, his brother Robert asked him what the Sam Hill was going on and gazed into his eyes to try to get an answer, Lee said quietly: “Brother, you won’t find anything there.”

During months of research in Minsk, Mailer looked into the eyes of that other Cold War enigma, Russia, yet didn’t find much there, either. The KGB transcripts of domestic arguments between Lee and his wife show only that they rowed “fiercely and pointlessly.” Oswald snarled at Marina that she was lazy and dirty, and she snapped back that he didn’t help and was by far the dirtier: “Look at your pillow; you sleep on it once and it’s already dirty.”

Oswald in the Soviet Union turns out to have been much the same, rather timid, nondescript, idle character he was in Texas. Of course he excited initial curiosity, but the comrades soon lost interest. Including the blondes. He had nothing new to say to them; he would tell jokes, but they were just stupid stories. At least he kept out of trouble in the restrictive, ultra-sober Soviet town; had he stayed, he would probably by now be a shabby Belorussian provincial, playing chess, listening to music and occasionally hunting rabbits. But he didn’t stay. He needed, one suspects, the violence endemic in America; and needed its more obvious inequalities, even with a generally higher standard of life, to justify his rage.

His aging Minsk acquaintances show the normal muddle of guesswork about his guilt or innocence. “He wouldn’t kill a fly. . . . Could be part of a plot, but not the killer. . . . He would have done anything to be famous. . . .” Ilya Prusakov, Marina’s uncle and guardian, claimed the assassination was organized; if Oswald had been used, it was because he had been in the Soviet Union. Prusakov was an officer of military intelligence; his career suffered as a result of the family connection. He was also a bibliophile whose library included sets of Swift, Dickinson, Tagore and Proust. (And isn’t that crazy, a KGB type who enjoyed Tagore and Dickinson!) Oswald did well in marrying Marina; she had a decency that has stayed the course. Mailer pays tribute to her honesty through five days of interview, painfully searching the past for shards of truth.

There are a host of intriguing shards in this epic, if overlong, exploration of a psyche--and perhaps a psycho. Yet still the past is another country, behind an iron curtain. And still the case remains open.

BOOK MARK: For an excerpt from “Oswald’s Tale,” see the Opinion section.