ABSTRACT
Norman Mailer's excursion into the riddles of the Kennedy assassination is a case in point. He is not trying his hand once again in colorful journalism, evincing what he once called his need "to speak to one's time," as in his best-selling accounts of the politics of the 1960s, catching tumultuous events on the wing. Here, in one of his new books entitled Oswald's Tale: an American Mystery, he busies himself diligently with unpublished KGB transcripts and recollections of Oswald's friends in Soviet Russia before he returned to the U.S.—and to the Texas Schoolbook Depository building in Dallas. Oswald was dyslexic, and his orthography and syntax are so bad at times that the man is not revealed but concealed—in the worst of his letters he seems stupid and illiterate. Therefore, it seems worth giving him some benefit in this direction in order better to perceive the workings of his mind.
