I’m on a mission. I’m on a mission to explain how Lee was set up. I believe that getting that piece right is key to understanding the assassination. Figure out the shape of one piece, and you are able to fit the other pieces around it.
A smaller piece is why was Lee hanging around with Michael Paine in 1963? What brought these two men from very different worlds together?
It would be very interesting to write at length about those two worlds, how these two men came out of them, how one was shot down on live TV and how the other got to retire to a reduced version of his life, but still alive.
I know a little bit about one of their worlds, although as a visitor, and very little about the other. Somehow I don’t think Lee was raised Catholic, although his Murret cousins were.
I once asked Max Good, what did he think Lee was thinking as he went to work on November 22. Max replied to the effect he wasn’t worried about the little things; he was looking at the big picture. I respect that, but I’m still wondering what Lee was thinking that morning as he got into Buell Wesley Frazier’s car, put a package, if there was one, on the back seat, and rode silently and calmly downtown.
Did he think he was going to kill the President? Did he think someone was going to kill the president? Did he think someone was going to fire and miss, a provocation like the Walker stunt times a million? What was in the bag on the back seat? The rifle, broken down? The scope? His lunch?
Norman Mailer would go with the rifle.
Lee didn’t have a chance with Norman Mailer.
It is difficult to write about Norman Mailer because I haven’t read him before, I think, so I want to say I don’t know anything about Norman Mailer but of course, that’s impossible, and I do.
“Oswald’s Tale: an american mystery” is Mailer’s take on Lee Oswald. Needless to say, it is written very well, and the first part is a trove of interviews done in the 1990’s by Mailer and his collaborator Lawrence Schiller, of all the people in Minsk who knew Marina, and Lee while he was there.
Except for the two most significant of his acquaintances, Alexander Ziger and Ernst Titovets. Still for a post-Soviet account of the Soviet world and Lee’s story in it, it is very interesting, but it tells us nothing and reads a bit like Doctor Zhivago.
It tells us nothing about Mailer’s vision of Lee as the frustrated übermensch whose violence escalated from hitting his wife to murdering the president.
That part is left to his reading of Priscilla McMillan, whose account I have studiously avoided up to this point because I do agree that she was a CIA approved and probably CIA enabled author . Now that I’ve read Mailer on Lee, I’ve perhaps read more than half of McMillan on Lee and Marina.
Lee doesn’t have a chance with this team of Mailer and McMillan.
Anyone whose bed partner is in bed with Priscilla McMillan and who triggers Norman Mailer is not going to get a good review.
Mailer, who gives Freud a worse name by running every story through his genitals, and McMillan, CIA mouthpiece, who got a dump from Marina and then sat on it for more than ten years, do not put Lee in a good light.
If you would like to know whether Lee came up with a new position during his two weeks in New Orleans without Marina, and whether Ruth Paine got a glimpse staying with them over the weekend after bringing Marina down to New Orleans, these are the authors for you.
Mailer does an incredible job of connecting the day by day week by week temperature of the Oswalds’ marital relationship, from beginning to fatal end, to the rise of the assassin in Lee’s psyche.
If you believe Mailer that is. Not much consideration given to possible external circumstances, the possibility that Lee was being squeezed by threats for example, or even that Lee was on missions of his choosing that he was determined to keep from his wife, or the possibility that Lee was desperate to get his family out of America because of those threats.
There is one key point though that I agree with Mailer on about Lee. Lee had agency. Mailer is determined to form a story where Lee is a person with agency. Not simply a pawn being moved around a chessboard.
I still want to know what Lee was thinking on Friday morning November 22, 1963, because I see Lee as a human being with agency. He was doing something and going somewhere. I don’t believe he was going to assassinate the president but I do believe that he expected this to be a different kind of day.
Next week: the Mafia?
Oswald’s Tale: an american mystery, Norman Mailer, 1995
Marina and Lee: the tormented love and fatal obsession behind lee harvey oswald’s assassination of john f. kennedy , Priscilla Johnson McMillan, 1977
Note: it became clumsy to administer, so I have reopened this Substack to “Public”.