Oswald's tale - Norman Mailer

[Eddy Bainbridge]

I have just finished reading this book and raced to Kennedys and King for a review, alas I can't find one. A quick search on here and I can only find dismissive comments.

My own judgment is that this is an extremely well researched and assembled book. I guess the majority of posters will find its conclusions unpalatable (Oswald was capable of having carried out the assassination alone, but the evidence does not foreclose on a conspiracy.)

The book left me convinced that Oswald was extremely disturbed and that no intelligence agency would have, or did work WITH him.  Painting Oswald as a harmless, ordinary guy is impossible after reading. In terms of his exploitation by Intelligence, I would conclude any such use would have left him highly uninformed and misinformed. The book suggests COINTELPRO as a link and I find it plausible Oswald's conduct after the assassination indicates a realisation that his anticipated liability had changed. The change was perhaps from a wrecker of the FPCC (Had the attempt been a pathetic and deliberate failure, with no injury to JFK) to an assassin?

 

Does anyone have more information on Yaeko Okui? A very interesting minor character.

 

[Chuck Schwartz]

After reading "Oswald and the CIA" by John Newman, I became convinced that LHO was handled by the CIA.  John Newman specializes in History, whereas Norman Mailer is a writer of fiction and a very good one at that.  This book you refer to is an exception for Norman Mailer.

[Jonathan Cohen]

58 minutes ago, Eddy Bainbridge said:

My own judgment is that this is an extremely well researched and assembled book. I guess the majority of posters will find its conclusions unpalatable (Oswald was capable of having carried out the assassination alone, but the evidence does not foreclose on a conspiracy.)

I agree with your assessment of this book, Eddy. Mailer also made a cantankerous and entertaining appearance at the ASK Symposium in Dallas around the time of its release.

[David Andrews]

2 hours ago, Eddy Bainbridge said:

 The change was perhaps from a wrecker of the FPCC (Had the attempt been a pathetic and deliberate failure, with no injury to JFK) to an assassin?

 

Slightly OT: The more I look at FPCC, the more I wonder if it wasn't a CIA creation from the get-go, set up to attract and catalog US Fidelistas.

[Gene Kelly]

David

I would recommend reading the informative three-part essays by Paul Bleau in Kennedys and King, "Exposing the FPCC".  In a related Bleau's article, "The Three Failed Plots to Kill JFK", he describes/links eight subjects who shared similar traits to Oswald.  Eight of the nine subjects profiled are connected to cities visited by Kennedy during the six months that preceded his assassination. Each of these cities was a territory exploited criminally by Mafiosi of interest.

• At least three moved to the cities and got employment in strategically located buildings along the motorcade route shortly before the planned presidential visit.
• Seven were ex-military and eight of them exhibited behavior that can very plausibly be linked to intelligence gathering or Cuban exile interaction.
• Seven were directly linked to the FPCC; seven of them had visited Mexico City, and six attempted to visit Cuba, three of them successfully.
• Seven had links to Cuban/Latino exiles.
• Six were described as having psychological problems and seven exhibited anti-Kennedy behavior… but none were probed seriously by the Warren Commission.

Researchers (e.g., Bill Simpich, John Newman) and Garrison investigators maintain that Oswald was being sheep-dipped so that the Soviets or Cubans could be blamed. Paul and others point out that four of the patsies (including Nagell) could be linked to the FPCC adds even more credence to this claim. It is also interesting to note that one of the mysterious investigators for the Chicago plot, Daniel Groth, had intelligence links and was likely tasked with monitoring the FPCC. When Oswald, already notorious for his Russian adventure, opened an FPCC chapter in, of all places, New Orleans by the middle of 1963, one can assume that he was a known quantity to all the agencies. And there is evidence that Oswald agitated for the FPCC in Dallas before moving to New Orleans.

The opening of a Miami FPCC chapter in 1963 by Santiago Garriga is more evidence of illegal domestic espionage on or through the FPCC by the CIA. According to Bill Simpich, author of State Secret, Garriga’s resumé was perfect for patsy recruiter/runners - interaction with Cuban associates in Mexico City; seemingly pro-Castro behavior; and his crowning achievement: like Oswald in 1963, he opened an FPCC chapter in a market deemed very hostile for such an enterprise. Garriga also represents a potential fall guy who is the most clearly linked with intelligence.

According to According to John Newman, the CIA - led by David Phillips and James McCord - began monitoring the FPCC in 1961. In December 1962, the CIA joined with the FBI in the AMSANTA project.  A September 1963 memo divulged an FBI/CIA plan to use FPCC fake materials to embarrass Cuba. There are strong indicators that the CIA efforts to penetrate and use the FPCC were local and illegal––such as spying on U.S. citizen/members of the FPCC.

This FPCC was definitely a creation/creature of the CIA.

Gene

[Benjamin Cole]

9 hours ago, Gene Kelly said:

David

I would recommend reading the informative three-part essays by Paul Bleau in Kennedys and King, "Exposing the FPCC".  In a related Bleau's article, "The Three Failed Plots to Kill JFK", he describes/links eight subjects who shared similar traits to Oswald.  Eight of the nine subjects profiled are connected to cities visited by Kennedy during the six months that preceded his assassination. Each of these cities was a territory exploited criminally by Mafiosi of interest.

• At least three moved to the cities and got employment in strategically located buildings along the motorcade route shortly before the planned presidential visit.
• Seven were ex-military and eight of them exhibited behavior that can very plausibly be linked to intelligence gathering or Cuban exile interaction.
• Seven were directly linked to the FPCC; seven of them had visited Mexico City, and six attempted to visit Cuba, three of them successfully.
• Seven had links to Cuban/Latino exiles.
• Six were described as having psychological problems and seven exhibited anti-Kennedy behavior… but none were probed seriously by the Warren Commission.

Researchers (e.g., Bill Simpich, John Newman) and Garrison investigators maintain that Oswald was being sheep-dipped so that the Soviets or Cubans could be blamed. Paul and others point out that four of the patsies (including Nagell) could be linked to the FPCC adds even more credence to this claim. It is also interesting to note that one of the mysterious investigators for the Chicago plot, Daniel Groth, had intelligence links and was likely tasked with monitoring the FPCC. When Oswald, already notorious for his Russian adventure, opened an FPCC chapter in, of all places, New Orleans by the middle of 1963, one can assume that he was a known quantity to all the agencies. And there is evidence that Oswald agitated for the FPCC in Dallas before moving to New Orleans.

The opening of a Miami FPCC chapter in 1963 by Santiago Garriga is more evidence of illegal domestic espionage on or through the FPCC by the CIA. According to Bill Simpich, author of State Secret, Garriga’s resumé was perfect for patsy recruiter/runners - interaction with Cuban associates in Mexico City; seemingly pro-Castro behavior; and his crowning achievement: like Oswald in 1963, he opened an FPCC chapter in a market deemed very hostile for such an enterprise. Garriga also represents a potential fall guy who is the most clearly linked with intelligence.

According to According to John Newman, the CIA - led by David Phillips and James McCord - began monitoring the FPCC in 1961. In December 1962, the CIA joined with the FBI in the AMSANTA project.  A September 1963 memo divulged an FBI/CIA plan to use FPCC fake materials to embarrass Cuba. There are strong indicators that the CIA efforts to penetrate and use the FPCC were local and illegal––such as spying on U.S. citizen/members of the FPCC.

This FPCC was definitely a creation/creature of the CIA.

Gene

Great post Gene. 

[James DiEugenio]

I agree Gene.

Can you please link to Mailer's appearance at ASK Eddy?

When Mailer was doing an interview for his book, John Newman called in and read him the riot act. 

Because his book, Oswald and the CIA, was published about a year and a half before Mailer's book was. Yet, Mailer did not make any reference to the CIA files on Oswald.

This has gotten even worse today because of the work of Betsy Wolf and the more recent declassifications about Mexico City.

What does Mailer say about those matters?

Edited July 24, 2023 by James DiEugenio

[Benjamin Cole]

If any of you want to be reminded just how perverted and crazily imbalanced the NYT is regarding the JFKA, read this 1995 review of Norman Mailer's book. 

Keep in mind that the HSCA published its report, in 1979, and officially concluded there had likely been a conspiracy to assassinate JFK. 

Pay attention to Mailer's sordid take on LHO's possible love-and-murder life in the Philippines. 

---30---

The Mind of The Assassin

Date: April 30, 1995, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
Byline: By Thomas Powers;
Lead:

OSWALD'S TALE An American Mystery. By Norman Mailer. 828 pp. New York: Random House. $30.
Text:

IF Jack Ruby had trusted the American legal system to deal with the killer of Jack Kennedy, or if he had been delayed another five minutes at the Western Union office where he'd gone to send a money order that Sunday morning, or if he had been halted at the door of the Dallas police station, or if he had been searched and his gun seized, or if his gun had been deflected and his bullet had gone two inches either way, then Norman Mailer's leviathan volume "Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery," along with many of its predecessors, would never have been written. Lee Harvey Oswald in prison for decade after decade -- surfacing in the news whenever parole boards met, but otherwise forgotten, like Sirhan Sirhan, James Earl Ray, Arthur Bremer, John Hinckley -- would have faded back down to size. It is Oswald dead and unexplained that excites suspicion. We needed a good long look in order to forget him.

One of the questions Oswald eventually might have answered was, Why Kennedy? The 26 volumes of evidence collected by the Warren Commission in its investigation of the assassination reveal nothing in Oswald's life to match Mailer's long obsession with this President. Some months before Oswald smuggled his Italian rifle into the Texas School Book Depository, he used it to take a shot at a very different target, Maj. Gen. Edwin A. Walker, while he sat at his desk one night in Dallas in April 1963.

Why Walker? The retired general had been in the news. He had a small reputation as a right-wing zealot and demagogue. He lived only a bus ride away. Local newspapers reported his return from a well-publicized speaking tour a day or two before Oswald was fired from a printing company, where he held the only job he ever liked. Oswald had recently purchased the rifle by mail for $22. His marriage to Marina Prusakova was a dank hell of hurt feelings. So Oswald scouted Walker's residence, approached it by dark, fired a single shot and then hurried home to listen breathlessly to the radio to learn if he had succeeded. He had not.

Oswald told Marina, "Look how many people would have been spared if somebody had eliminated Hitler." But Oswald could have made no serious case that Walker was really an embryonic Hitler. Walker was little more than a name to him. It would be fairer to say that Oswald was in a murderous mood and Walker happened by.

That such a blind and meaningless chain of contingency could be all the explanation offered by history for the long national trauma of the murder of John F. Kennedy is more than Norman Mailer is willing to accept without a struggle -- an 828-page struggle, in point of fact. In "Oswald's Tale" Mailer argues that if we ascribe this great event to Oswald acting by himself, prompted by his own prosaic agonies, guided by luck to hit a moving target at 88 yards when he had missed Walker at 35, then we concede that "we live in a universe that is absurd." This Mailer is not about to do. "It . . . is more tolerable," he says, if we can see Kennedy's killer as "tragic rather than absurd."

So Mailer's self-appointed task in his 28th book is to provide Oswald's life with some stature beyond a few seconds of lucky shooting. Previous attempts to give Kennedy's murder a cause as big as the consequence have generally tried to dismiss Oswald as little more than a plain foot soldier -- a patsy -- in a dark machine of conspiracy. Mailer tells us he began his own existential errand "with a prejudice in favor of the conspiracy theorists." But despite much probing of the Warren Commission's lone-assassin version of the deed, it is pretty clear that from the outset Mailer was not really looking for, and certainly did not expect to find, phantom shooters on the grassy knoll, rogue C.I.A. officers, K.G.B. specialists in assassinations ("wet affairs"), anti-Castro zealots, Mafia hit men or any of the other candidate conspirators provided by central casting over the years. What Mailer went looking for was the soul of the man who squeezed the trigger.

"Oswald's Tale" is two books. They are completely different in style and method. Either one of these books published alone would have been a minor affair. The two together are breathtaking in ambition and ask more than readers may be prepared to give. Let's look at them in order.

In the fall of 1959 in Moscow, the former marine Lee Harvey Oswald "defected" to Russia -- that is, he made such a scene that Soviet authorities reluctantly granted his application for residence. For 30 months he lived in the Byelorussian city of Minsk, where he worked (none too hard) in a factory that assembled radios, lived in a one-room apartment grand by Soviet standards, eventually learned pretty good Russian, married a Russian woman and was watched with obsessive care by the local office of the K.G.B. In May 1962, after a year of struggle with Soviet and American bureaucracies, Oswald engineered his return to the United States with his new wife and infant daughter.

While the cold war lasted, this blank period of Oswald's life offered a kind of terra incognita for the plotting required by assassination theorists if their conspiracies were to be plausible. One British writer, for example, argued that the real Oswald had been replaced during the Minsk years by a Soviet look-alike who then "returned" to America, killed Kennedy and was exposed (by the British author) only after an autopsy revealed that the dead Oswald was too tall to be the real Oswald. This bizarre tale depended heavily on the fact that investigators could not go to Russia, let alone Minsk, and nose around.

But the terra was not really incognita. A rich and vivid account of Oswald's life in Minsk was published in 1977 by Priscilla Johnson McMillan after extended conversations with Oswald's widow. Despite strong reviews (including an enthusiastic one, in these pages, by me), Ms. McMillan's book, "Marina and Lee," made no deep impression on the public, which was unready to recognize, much less accept, Oswald's humanity, while the professional assassination scholars darkly suspected that Marina (and perhaps even Ms. McMillan!) might be part of the plot.

It was into this still (relatively) virgin territory that Mailer entered after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, armed with promises of access to onetime K.G.B. officers and previously secret files as well as to the many former Soviet citizens who had known Marina Prusakova or Oswald during his years in Minsk. The result of six months of interviews by Mailer and his colleague Lawrence Schiller with about 50 Russians is "Oswald in Minsk With Marina," the roughly 350-page self-contained "Volume 1" of "Oswald's Tale."

Oswald was only 20 when he arrived in Minsk. His experience of the world had been limited to a stint in the Marines. He was severely dyslexic, had done poorly in school, had been moved repeatedly by his hysterically narcissistic mother throughout his childhood, fancied himself a student of Marxism and had begun a "Historic Diary" to record his discoveries in the homeland of Communism. Oswald's Russian was self-taught and rudimentary. He had no skills. He tended to fall in love with every woman who crossed his path.

The world Oswald found in Minsk was colorless, impoverished, lonely and dull. His friends all put in six-day workweeks and went home to cramped lives in tiny apartments. They yearned for material possessions of the humblest sort, were a little awe-struck at knowing an actual American, trembled when called on the carpet by "the Organs," as they called the secret police. The young men Oswald knew were all looking for girls, the women were looking for husbands, and Marina and Lee, after the twists and turns usual to courtship, found each other. Some marriages go wrong slowly over years; Marina and Lee appear to have plunged into pain and recrimination almost immediately, and while Marina herself thought that in some ways -- sexually, for example -- things gradually improved during their years together, to Mailer their marriage seems like the death of a thousand cuts.

All of this is described wonderfully well. Mailer's account adds many new characters and incidents to the story told by Ms. McMillan, but it is also distinguished by a brilliant linguistic invention, a kind of Mailer-patent Russian-English that captures Russian rhythms not only of language but also of thinking and feeling about love, work and the ways of the world. Oswald's Intourist guide when he first arrived in Moscow in 1959 was a young woman named Rimma Shirakova. After a suicide attempt that persuaded the authorities to let Oswald stay, Mailer writes in a typical passage, "Rimma's relationship with Lee became a good deal closer. He was very much like a relative now -- but not a brother, not a boyfriend, in between. He wanted to kiss her and was ready to try, but she didn't want that. She never kissed him at all, not ever. . . . Certainly not. She had a boyfriend. . . . A Russian writer said once, 'It's better to die than to kiss without love,' and good girls were of that same opinion. If she didn't love him and didn't want close relations, then she should not kiss. So she patted him on his hand. Enough. Her psychology."

The style of "Oswald in Minsk With Marina" is like a novel stripped of everything but the story. There are no cumbersome asides to track great events off stage, no boring travelogues, no Tolstoyan speculations on fate and history. What we get is Oswald plain.

In this marvelous book within a book we learn two things. The first is that Oswald was unhappy to the root. When he got what he wanted, he grew restless and angry and ruined what he had. The second contribution of "Oswald in Minsk" to the story of the Kennedy assassination is to be found in Mailer's account of the investigations of two pseudonymous officers of the K.G.B., whose job was to establish whether or not Oswald had been deliberately inserted into the Soviet Union by the C.I.A. on a mission of espionage. K.G.B. counterintelligence officers bring no sense of humor to such questions. They investigated Oswald as if he were Trotsky returned from the dead, beginning with a meticulous examination of questions like whether Oswald was secretly fluent in Russian despite the appearance of halting incomprehension; whether he brought to his work in the radio factory a suspiciously deep knowledge of electronics; whether on outings with a local hunting club he betrayed undue curiosity about forbidden zones. The K.G.B. watchers followed Oswald daily; his friends were interrogated; his apartment was bugged; and his conversations, consisting frequently of crazily painful quarrels with Marina, were recorded and transcribed. These domestic miseries reassured the K.G.B. that Oswald was not in fact a master spy but a pathetic nonentity.

"Stepan," the K.G.B. officer in charge of street surveillance of Oswald, is presented to us by Mailer in a seven-page life that is to my mind one of the greatest encapsulations of the soul of the policeman to be found anywhere in literature. "Asked one more time to give his opinion of Oswald's case," Mailer writes, "he says it proved to be 'primitive -- a basic case,' because it did not involve anyone of extreme intelligence. Nor did it cost too much money. Oswald did not have a large circle of friends and was not erratic in his behavior. It wasn't as if one week he had three friends and by the following week had accumulated twenty so they had to increase their budget immediately to watch twenty people instead of three. No, this case was simple because it did not have variables, it did not fluctuate, and finally there wasn't much that really raised a lot of new questions."

The second book in Mailer's tome, "Oswald in America," is completely different. There is nothing new in it. Mailer has declined to phone up all the old witnesses with all the old questions. Instead, for his account of Oswald's slow progress toward the awful day, Mailer resorts to the record, which turns out to include not only the mountains of testimony and evidence collected by the Warren Commission but also three published books: Edward Jay Epstein's "Legend" (1978), which suggests without actually claiming that Oswald was part of some broader conspiracy; Gerald Posner's "Case Closed" (1993), which argues with an awesome command of evidentiary detail that Oswald did it, period; and the already mentioned "Marina and Lee." Of the three Mailer depends by far the most heavily on Ms. McMillan's book, quoting from it scores of passages and thousands of words, for which right he paid a modest sum.

With these materials Mailer has fashioned a narrative history of Oswald's life and deeds. In style it is workmanlike and thorough. In whole chapters, Mailer writes, it will be his job simply "to guide each transcript to its proper placement on the page." Mailer the author comes to roaring life only with his "speculations," some of which set a new record even for Mailer for defying the law of gravity. Of the never-quite-explained death of one of Oswald's fellow marines in the Philippines, who died of a gunshot wound entering beneath the arm and exiting through the neck, Mailer writes that it is "an undeclared possibility" that he was murdered by a man performing fellatio! And it is "not inconceivable" that that man was Oswald! For this there is no trace of a wisp of a shred of evidence. But if it were true, imagine what an effect it would have had on him! In Mailer this sort of extravagance is a sign of irrepressible high spirits. [ed. note: Was Mailer mentally ill? And the NYT reviewer also? ]

In soberer fashion he pauses in his narrative with irritating frequency to consider possible evidence of unseen hands. It's my guess that even the most indifferent reader has heard most of the "what abouts" before. What about the shadowy figures of Guy Banister and David Ferrie, who passed within Oswald's orbit in New Orleans? What about the Cuban woman Sylvia Odio, who says Oswald and two secret operatives visited her on a certain night in Dallas in September 1963? What about the mysterious George de Mohrenschildt, who knew Oswald, knew C.I.A. officers and shot himself after passing on dark hints to a writer in 1977? What about the Mafia heavies Jack Ruby knew? Like a Natty Bumppo of the political wilderness, Mailer pauses by each bent twig and bruised blade of grass, looking for signs of a passing herd of conspiratorial buffalo. None of it goes anywhere.

But the central body of the story, while familiar in outline, has lost none of its power, and Mailer draws us into its spell. From the Dallas papers, Oswald learned that the President's motorcade would pass the Texas School Book Depository, where he worked. On Thursday, Nov. 21, the day before the assassination, he told a friend at his job that he needed to pick up some curtain rods. The friend drove him out to the Dallas suburb where Marina was staying with the children. That evening Marina rejected Oswald's plea that she move back in with him; during the night he kicked away her foot when she touched him in bed. In the morning he left money on the bureau -- more than he had ever left before. He also left his wedding ring -- something he had never done. He busied himself in the garage with an object wrapped in a blanket. He drove back into Dallas for work carrying his brown paper parcel of "curtain rods."

So it goes -- one relentless detail pressing on another, through the killing, the arrest, the time in jail, the panic of wife and mother and brother, the terrible moment when Jack Ruby lunged through the police line and fired the single pistol bullet that denied us forever Oswald's tale as he might have told it himself.

But Mailer has not forgotten his existential errand. To the familiar story he has added a careful gloss of his own. His goal is to give Oswald an inner life commensurate with his deed, to chart the future assassin's thoughts as he sought frantically for some combination of act and stance that would express his own sense of worth. That Oswald rated this very highly Mailer does not doubt, nor does he scoff. In Oswald's own mind, Mailer suggests, the man who dressed himself in black for a portrait with his gun is a kind of "private-general." The public Oswald is as low in the formal rank of things as a buck private in the Army. But the secret Oswald is a marshaler of great forces, a driver of history, a general on the level of Hannibal or Napoleon. On the eve of the private-general's apotheosis, Mailer writes, "Oswald has reached that zone of serenity that some men attain before combat, when anxiety is deep enough to feel like quiet exaltation." After the killing Oswald spent the final two days of his life in jail, "gathering in some vast multiple of all the attention he had been denied for most of his life."

At the end of his book Mailer approaches his own quiet exaltation, the moment when the evidence has been presented and the author must tell us without prevarication what he thinks it means. Mailer has Oswald firmly in mind now. The doubts have all been put aside. "Every insight we have gained of him," he writes, "suggests the solitary nature of his act."

Why Kennedy? "It was the largest opportunity he had ever been offered."

Mailer is not the first historian of the assassination to remark on Oswald's aggrandizing ego. Priscilla Johnson McMillan took the measure of the man with great precision nearly 20 years ago. But Mailer is the first deliberately to treat Oswald's estimate of himself with respect. A fine title for his book, he writes, would have been "An American Tragedy," reminding us of his hope that a "tragic" Oswald would somehow soften the blow of Kennedy's murder and thereby save us from the despair of living in an "absurd" universe. It took courage and generosity for Mailer to conceive of this mighty rescue operation.

Does it work?

For success Mailer must draw on a reader's reserves of human empathy here, and I am afraid mine are not quite up to the job. I was never confused about who killed Kennedy, and the fact that Oswald wanted attention does not make me feel better. I admire Mailer for his effort to understand Oswald, but at some level I feel invited to place a sympathetic arm around the killer's shoulder, and I'm not about to do it. "Oswald's Tale" brings us right up to the pinch-lipped misery and sour odor of the man. He brought pain to many and happiness to none. Anger is what this makes me feel. It was an insect that brought Kennedy down. Would to God he had popped first beneath somebody's foot.

[Charles Blackmon]

"Every insight we have gained of him," he writes, "suggests the solitary nature of his act."  None of that insight places LHO on the 6th floor at 12:30 CST.

[George Govus]

Too true, Charles.

BTW, any confirmation to my perception that "too true" is morphing due to linguistic drift into "true, true?" Asking for a friend.

Edited July 24, 2023 by George Govus

[Joe Bauer]

Would have liked to have seen Mailer do an equivalent study tome on LBJ and/or J. Edgar Hoover.

Or Allan Dulles?

Or a historical study of and reflection on the C.I.A.?

Haven't read "Oswald's Tale."

I know I should.

Curious about Mailer's take on Sylvia Odio's own "Oswald's Tale."

Did he simply think her tale was a case of mistaken identity?

Manipulated or not by others including Leopoldo?

Or perhaps mostly a figment of her own mental affliction case of hysterical anxiety imagination?

If Mailer could have personally met and interacted with the exotic white Spanish beauty Sylvia Odio one figures he would have put the make on her... legendary lothario as he was.

Also George De Mohrenschildt?

Now GDM was a man whose life story would have made for a rich aristocratic study meal for Mailer imo. 

Oswald's was the sad and barren opposite.

 

Edited July 24, 2023 by Joe Bauer

[Joe Bauer]

For a confused, desperate esteem starved nobody Oswald sure garnered a lot Priscilla Johnson McMillan's attention and time, starting just days after he arrived in Russia and continuing after the JFKA.

Her deep immersion into Marina's life on a personal level after the JFKA also seemed overly done.

She became Marina's number one confidant/advisor ( for how long? ) and vulnerable Marina seemed to fall under PM's "Carol Channing" type charming controller spell.

PM is a suspiciously intriguing thread throughout the entire Oswald/Marina story line. For years!

From Oswald's arrival in Russia to writing managing Marina's book and getting it published.

 

Edited July 24, 2023 by Joe Bauer

[James DiEugenio]

When the NY Times sends someone like CIA flack Thomas Powers out to do a review of a JFK book, you know the fix is in.

This was Dick Helms' authorized biographer..

When Sy Hersh's godawful book on JFK was getting pummeled by just about everyone, including the NY TImes, they sent Powers out to do a salvage job on that POS.

That tells you a lot.

The other thing is that Larry Schiller put Mailer up to the job.  The guy who has a 42 page informant file on the JFK case with the FBI.

How about this one: 

"Every insight we have gained of him," he writes, "suggests the solitary nature of his act."

Oh really?  Oswald liked Kennedy.  According to the late David Lifton, he had a picture of him on the wall from Time magazine.

 

 

Edited July 24, 2023 by James DiEugenio

[Steve Thomas]

On 7/23/2023 at 11:55 AM, Gene Kelly said:

David

The opening of a Miami FPCC chapter in 1963 by Santiago Garriga is more evidence of illegal domestic espionage on or through the FPCC by the CIA.

 

Gene

Gene,

I can't think of the FPCC without thinking of these two guys.

This is from the Simkin Educational Forum pages:

"On 1st June, 1953, [Jack] Caulfield joined the New York City Police Department. Caulfield spoke fluent Spanish and therefore two years later he was transferred to the NYPD's Bureau of Special Service and Investigation (BOSSI).

Caulfield also investigated political groups including the American Nazi Party, the Fair Play For Cuba Committee (FPCC) and a terrorist group based in Canada.

 

(ed. note: BOSSI was New York City’s Red Squad.)

 

In 1949 [Tony] Ulasewicz joined the NYPD's Bureau of Special Service and Investigation (BOSSI).

Richard Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 presidential election and in April, 1969, Caulfield was appointed as Staff Assistant to the President. Soon afterwards Nixon decided that the White House should establish an in-house investigative capability that could be used to obtain sensitive political information. After consulting John Ehrlichman and H. R. Haldeman the job was given to Caulfield.

Caulfield now appointed an old friend, Tony Ulasewicz, to carry out this investigative work."

 

Steve Thomas

[Joe Bauer]

1 hour ago, James DiEugenio said:

How about this one: 

"Every insight we have gained of him," he writes, "suggests the solitary nature of his act."

Sounds like such a mundane summation statement after all the dramatic build up Mailer injected into his Oswald study. Interviewing former KGB, Russian friends of Oswald's and Marina. Borrowing from Priscilla McMillan?

And the final word is simply...Oswald did it all by himself?

Nothing to Oswald's activities and associations in New Orleans, Clinton, Mexico City etc.?