TRUMP, NIXON AND THE NFL: THE TLS ESSAY

I've written a small essay for the TLS on Donald Trump's call for owners to fire any son of a bitch who kneels during the playing of the national anthem. You can link to it here. There may be a little too much background detail about the situation, but we had to assume the audience was not very NFL-savvy. And I did explain that Don DeLillo's End Zone makes the point that while football is like warfare, only warfare is really like warfare, which why, in end, we were in Vietnam. But that didn't make the cut.

I thought about mentioning that Trump's speech came at the Wernher von Braun Research Hall in Huntsville, named after the former SS Sturmbahnfuhrer who masterminded the US space programme. But that would have been a cheap shot. Bad.

JFK ASSASSINATION LITERATURE: THE OPEN BOOK ESSAY

Last week my essay on the literature of the JFK assassination was broadcast on Open Book. It's still available on IPlayer here (about nine minutes in).Because of time limitations, portions of the essay we recorded had to be edited out, so what follows is the original script; what we intended to cram into six or seven minutes.

The bits that are gone are mainly toward the end--the establishing of Oswald as a patsy and, most sadly, the brilliant JFK And The Unspeakable, which not only makes the case for conspiracy, but places that conspiracy firmly into an ongoing context. You can read my original review of that book, written for the magazine Lobster, here.

Still, it's wonderful to be able to get ahead of the inevitable deluge that will engulf the 50th anniversary come November, and Open Book is, as always, a great listen...

THE LITERATURE OF THE JFK ASSASSINATION

Everybody remembers. I was in eighth grade art class when Mrs Hugins was called away. She came back to tell us President Kennedy had been shot and we were being sent home. Two days later I saw Jack Ruby shoot Lee Oswald dead. It was all open and shut.

So it seemed to this boy of 12. JFK's Camelot of a White House had been struck down by a Communist defector misfit. A year later, the Warren Commission endorsed that simple explanation, but instead of calming the nation, it raised more questions than it answered. The Warren Report spawned a minefield of debate and disinformation, which has spawned more than a thousand books. By the time I turned 16, it was open and shut no longer.

The best of the first wave wear their reaction in their titles: Mark Lane's Rush To Judgement, Harold Weisberg's Whitewash, and Sylvia Meagher's Accessories After The Fact which catalogues the evidence buried within the Report's 26 volume appendix. The early fictions, meanwhile, approached Kennedy's murder metaphorically: Thomas Pynchon's Crying Of Lot 49, Loren Singer's Parallax View, and Winter Kills, by Richard Condon (author of the Manchurian Candidate) where the president's assassination is ordered by his mob-connected father.

Stephen King's recent novel 11-22-63 is a throwback, dismissing doubters of the official verdict as those who can't accept Kennedy's death as an act of random absurdity. In his novel, a Maine school-teacher goes back in time to stop Oswald. It's a good time-travel story, powerfully imagining the butterfly effect of Kennedy's survival; much of King's work has always been revisiting a more innocent time. His picture of Oswald as lone crazed assassin fits his sense of American innocence betrayed.

He still had that prissy little smile on his face when he walked up to me. Arrogant and prissy, both at the same time. He's wearing that smile in just about every photograph anyone tried to take of him....basically, there's nothing more to see anyway. Just a skinny little wife-abuser waiting to be famous.

But in the end...it was almost certainly Oswald. You've heard of Occam's Razor, haven't you? ...'all things being equal, the simplest explanation is usually the right one.'
- (reading from 11-22-63)

The collapse of trust in government in the Seventies wake of the Watergate scandal, saw a House of Representatives investigation conclude the likelihood of a Kennedy conspiracy, but also a reluctance to blame anyone but the Mafia. The derailing of the committee is detailed in Gaeton Fonzi's The Last Investigation. British journalist Anthony Summers' Conspiracy, first published in 1980, became the crucial one-volume summary, but the real steps forward belonged to the two best Kennedy novels. Charles McCarry's Tears Of Autumn got him labelled the American John LeCarre,while Don DeLillo's Libra shows a typically obsessive DeLillo protagonist endlessly researching the ultimately unknowable.

“Think of two parallel lines...One is the life of Lee H. Oswald. One is the conspiracy to kill the President. What bridges the space between them? What makes a connection inevitable? There is a third line. It comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of the self. It's not generated by cause and effect like the other two lines. It's a line that cuts across causality, cuts across time. It has no history that we can recognize or understand. But it forces a connection. It puts a man on the path of his destiny.

-(reading from Libra)

The third wave of JFK literature was sparked by the 1991 release of Oliver Stone's movie JFK—whose JFK: The Book Of The Film is itself worth reading. The establishment response was Gerald Posner's ballyhooed Case Closed, a prosecutor's selective brief against Oswald and for the Warren Report. Norman Mailer called Posner only intermittently reliable, but used him as the basis for Oswald's Tale, in which Lee's unhappy marriage to the Russian beauty Marina saw him shoot Kennedy in a fit of jealous envy. More telling was James Ellroy, who claims America's innocence disappeared on the first boats over, and said the 'real trinity of Camelot was look good, kick ass, get laid'. No idealist, his conspiracy, laid out in The Cold Six Thousand oozes with sleazy reality.

He got the basic stats: One suspect caught—a kid-- a sheep-dipped leftist. Guy Bannister dipped him. The kid killed a cop. Two cops were sent to kill him. Phase two went bad. The second cop botched his assignment.

Littell holstered up. Littell studied his ID....

The streets were dead. The windows zipped by. Ten thousand TVs glowed.

It was HIS show.

He developed the plan. Pete Bondurant helped. Carlos okayed it and went with Guy Bannister's crew. Guy embellished HIS plan. Guy revised it. Guy botched it. …

Littell counted windows. All tint-distorted. Smudges and blurs. His thoughts blew wide. His thoughts cohered:

Talk to Pete. Kill Oswald. Ensure a one-shooter consensus.
- (reading from The Cold Six Thousand)

The portrait of Oswald we get from Warren, Posner, Mailer, and King actually shows most convincingly that he was uniquely qualified to become someone's perfect patsy. Ray and Mary LaFontaine, in Oswald Talked, made a convincing case for Oswald as a failed government informer, ripe for the set-up. And in 2008, James Douglass' JFK and the Unspeakable put forward the strongest case yet for a conspiracy, including detailing an earlier, eerily similar plot derailed only by the President's cancelling a trip to Chicago. After nearly 50 years, Douglass showed there were still new approaches, with echoes right up to the present.

The Unspeakable is not far away. It is not somewhere out there, identical with a government that became foreign to us. The emptiness of the void, the vacuum of responsibility and compassion, it is ourselves. Our citizen denial provides the grounds for the government's 'plausible deniability'....by avoiding our responsibility for the escalating crimes of state done for our security, we who failed to confront the unspeakable opened the door to JFK's assassination and its coverup.
- (reading from JFK And The Unspeakable)

The problem is believers in conspiracy assume the burden of proof, not just to find who really did pull the trigger on Kennedy, which would be impossible now, but for every other conspiracy as well, whether the Royal Family are really lizards from space or Elvis is still alive. As the generation which remembers the event begins to die off, newer, more immediate plots may push Kennedy into history's background. Meanwhile Oswald's ghost remains a permanent patsy, there to persuade us violence and history really are random, beyond our control. Which is why as Don DeLillo, reminds us...

The valuable work of theorists has shown us the dark possibilities, prodded us to admit to ourselves the difficult truth of the matter. No simple solution, no respite from mystery and chronic suspicion. Conspiracy is now the true faith.
- (reading from De Lillo's 1983 essay 'American Blood: A Journey through the Labyrinth of Dallas and JFK')

OSWALD'S TALE: THE SPECTATOR REVIEW

This review of Norman Mailer's Oswald's Tale first appeared in the Spectator, 2 September 1995. I dug it out when I was writing my script for my Open Book essay on the literature of the JFK assassination, which I will also post here in its original form sometime after tomorrow's repeat broadcast of Open Book. What follows is slightly different from the published review-- I've made a correction, incorporated some of the ideas from my original draft, and added one or two small points--but it is substantially the same. I was tempted to go off on a tangent, comparing the Kennedys of An American Dream and Oswald's Tale, or the Kennedy of the former with Oswald himself, but that's really a whole separate essay! And I do wish that Mailer had been able to fulfill his promise at the end of Harlot's Ghost: 'to be continued'. And yes, the Henry Wade who was Dallas DA (and denied knowing Jack Ruby, which was easily disproved) is the same DA who was the defendant in Roe vs Wade).

 

If Marina Oswald had let her husband Lee make love to her on the evening of 21 November 1963, John Kennedy might still be alive. This is the major conclusion one can draw from Norman Mailer's 800-page excursion into the life and mind of the world's best-known alleged assassin.

Americans have always been keener on myth than reality, and few American writers have had a sharper grasp of American myth than Mailer. His forte has been taking real people and focusing his intellect and his instincts on what it is that turns them mythic. He has done this both in fiction (with JFK himself in An American Dream) and non-fiction (Richard Nixon, Marilyn Monroe, and, most tellingly, Gary Gilmore in The Executioner's Song). In many of these cases, it is death itself which confirms iconic status; this is true of John Kennedy and it should be true of Oswald as well. Certainly Mailer would like it to be.

The problem is that Oswald is no Gary Gilmore, and in trying to move him into iconic territory Mailer forgets his own instincts for American myth. A 'lone crazed assassin' might play better for his purposes, but reality has stacked the deck against such an interpretation of Oswald, not least because as a lone assassin he is so mundane. Instead, it is Oswald the patsy, and the JFK conspiracy, that has reached the level of myth.

In 1970, we might have welcomed Mailer's excursion into the conspiratorial quicksands of the assassination. Today, an increasingly prolix Mailer ignores the very lessons of deception he provided just four years ago in his own CIA epic, Harlot's Ghost, and seems content to tie some extensive research together with some dubious sources in a loose bow that comes undone almost instantly.

The new material in Oswald's Tale, much of it assembled by Lawrence Schiller, is an exhaustive combination of interviews conducted in Moscow and Minsk, along with transcripts of the KGB's bugging of Oswald and Marina's flat. Those looking for new insight into the mind and character of Oswald will be sorely disappointed—as will those looking for photographs. There is a good deal of repetition, and at times Mailer seems keener, or at least content, to reveal the character of life in the old Soviet Union, not for any insight it may throw on Oswald or his motives, but just for the chance to apply his metaphoric skills to another country. Certainly the new republic of Belarus may have welcomed that. But after all the information has been disseminated, the picture of Oswald still has huge questions, and Mailer's answers leave huge holes.

One might expect those holes to be filled once Oswald returns to the USA, but it is here the book falls apart. Mailer's two main sources for this period are Priscilla Johnson MacMillan's Marina and Lee and Gerald Posner's Case Closed (Posner's book itself draws heavily on the former). This is akin to using Mein Kampf as your primary source for a book about the Holocaust.

The best that can be said about Marina and Lee is that government agents sequestered Marina Oswald, who feared deportation, AND granted MacMillan exclusive access to her. Like others handed exclusives, she delivered what those granting the favour desired: a portrait of a lone crazed assassin in the making. It was not her first encounter with Oswald; in Moscow she had interviewed the putative defector; she has admitted to at least being debriefed by the CIA when she returned to Boston, though not to having discussed Oswald at all. Marina Oswald's story changed over the years, depending on who she was talking to. Mailer's interpretation of Marina's various testimonies is a keystone in granting Oswald his killer's status, yet as recently as 1993 Marina herself said unequivocally that 'Lee did not do it'.

Posner takes things a step further, by distorting or ignoring the case for conspiracy. Mailer obviously distrusts Case Closed; he has referred to Posner as 'only intermittently reliable', and occasionally he points out some of Posner's more blatant twistings of the record. Amazingly, he still relies on the book as a primary source. By following Posner, Mailer accepts a world full of extraordinary coincidence, in which none of the coincidences are meaningful. Oswald becomes a homicidal Zelig popping up a the right time in the Texas School Book Depository, while the people who shared the stage with him are simply written out of his tale. Posner's book was billed as being definitive on the JFK assassination; really it is a clumsy bit of extended character assassination: if we can convince you Oswald really was a nutter then you'll ignore the evidence and believe he acted alone.

Having journeyed 800 pages trying to build a portrait of Oswald as a singular force in history, Mailer is obliged, like Posner, to ignore the most obvious interpretation of Oswald's seemingly delusional and often contradictory psyche: he was the perfect candidate to be set up as someone's patsy. Mailer's coy dance around the possibility of Oswald's homosexuality lends the word patsy a particular vibrancy. Don De Lillo, in Libra, showed us more behind the shadows of those gay contacts, particularly the bizarre David Ferrie. Oliver Stone was accused, like Jim Garrison before him, of using Clay Shaw's sexuality to help demonise the possible conspirators, even Oswald. But for Mailer, this aspect of Oswald merely hints at why Marina wouldn't put out on that fateful night.

Proving there was a conspiracy requires showing only that a few of the myriad coincidences of Oswald's life are not merely random. Jack Ruby has always been a short-odds entry in that sweepstakes. For example, when Ruby corrected Dallas DA Henry Wade's reference to Oswald's subversive activities' at the Friday night press conference ('that's Fair Play For Cuba Committee') we wonder how Ruby knew the name of Oswald's bogus committee, and why he thought it crucial to set the record straight. Maybe he was just another pathetic attention-seeker, but witnesses also placed him with Oswald in his strip joint, the Carousel Club; in Dealey Plaza that morning; and at Parkland Hospital when JFK died.

The problem is that if just a few facts which suggest a conspiracy are real, then they challenge the hypothesis of Oswald as Norman Bates, as a lone crazed assassin, and Mailer must seek his new Gary Gilmore elsewhere. Oswald's Tale is indeed an American mystery, because Kennedy's death was the product of something more than an unrequited hard-on. That has always been Mailer's territory, but once upon a time Mailer would have been less concerned with solving the mystery, and more concerned with the deeper tale of an American tragedy.

Oswald's Tale: An American Tragedy by Norman Mailer

Little Brown, 1995, £25