Oswald’s Obsession Norman Mailer Dissects The Tormented Psyche Of Jfk’s Assassin In A Detailed And Revealing, Yet Morally Neutral, Profile

“Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery” By Norman Mailer (Random House, $30, 828 pp.)

Straining his muscular prose to the breaking point, Norman Mailer, the heavyweight champion of literary journalism, struggles mightily to elevate Lee Harvey Oswald to an exalted status as a tragic, existentialist hero or anti-hero in “Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery.”

Mixing journalistic and novelistic techniques, Mailer tries to transform Oswald’s image from a cipher and loser into an infinitely more complex character of depth and idealism.

His Oswald is a Nietzschean superman beyond good and evil, an American version of Raskolnikov, the young Russian idealist who, for what he believed was the higher good of mankind, axed two women to death in Dostoevski’s “Crime and Punishment.”

Mailer says he wrote this revisionist biography to help ease the nation’s pain that such a dwarf as Oswald could have murdered such a giant as Kennedy.

“So long as Oswald is a petty figure,” Mailer writes, “a lone twisted pathetic killer who happened to be in a position to kill a potentially great president, then … America is cursed with an absurdity.”

Mailer is not out to solve the riddles of JFK’s assassination. His ultimate conclusion is that he’s 75 percent sure Oswald acted alone. But, he adds, there’s more to be learned about what connections the CIA and FBI may have had.

What Mailer is really after is not a smoking gun but a complete portrait of Oswald. So he plowed through the Warren Commission report and oceans of related reading and went to Russia for six months of research.

There he and his aide, Larry Schiller, were granted access to once-classified KGB files, and interviewed former KGB agents and friends of Oswald (and his Russian bride, Marina), who lived in Minsk from 1959-62. The KGB kept an electronic device peering into the Oswalds’ Minsk apartment, snooping that provides Mailer with voyeuristic views of Lee and Marina’s rocky marriage.

Mailer sweeps up every crumb of information about Oswald, incorporating material from earlier studies, especially Priscilla Johnson McMillan’s “Marina and Lee.”

At times “Oswald’s Tale” is excruciatingly boring and bombastic, more a doorstopper than a heartstopper of a bio. At other times, though, it’s fascinating, but it never once matches “The Executioner’s Song,” Mailer’s masterly portrait of Gary Gilmore, a murderer executed in the 1970s by a firing squad in Utah.

As the omnipresent author, Mailer reveals his hero as, among other things, a wife beater, a psychopathic liar and a paranoid; an angry but timid boy and man; an agoraphobe; a wimp in the sack who may have been bisexual and have had extramarital affairs with men; a dyslexic who was orally gifted; a lazy worker who was a voracious reader; a mama’s boy who slept with his domineering mom until he was 11 and was bathed by her until he was 12; a boy beaten by schoolyard bullies and mocked years later by fellow Marines; and an adult enamored of, or at least inured to, his incessant body odor that sickened wife Marina.

But the real core of Oswald’s character is his obsession with making a leap from obscurity to fame. Assassinating JFK was his destiny and would make for a far better world, he believed.

Oswald was inspired by Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” identifying with the Fuhrer “as a man destined for greatness against all odds.”

Reflecting his view on the role of the hero in history, Oswald told Marina that millions of lives could have been saved if someone had assassinated Hitler.

Mailer never pauses to reflect on the enormous ethical difference between murdering an American president and assassinating a moral monster like Hitler. Here’s the problem with elevating Oswald to existentialist anti-hero status. There’s something morally repugnant about a romanticized, literary portrait of Oswald as a gutsy gunman with the right stuff to pull the trigger in his rendezvous with destiny.

Mailer’s high-flown rhetoric, a mix of existentialism and machismo, part Sartre, part Hemingway, blurs all moral distinctions. Yes, Hitler’s killer would, indeed, be a hero. But Kennedy’s murderer (or murderers) was not.