DON'T Believe Jack Tunheim by Doug Horne

[Dawn Meredith]

I ran into Mailer's book very early on and found it seductive. It wasn't the big man/little man thing that I found convincing, tho. It was the interviews with the Soviets along with Mailer's seeming lack of agenda. I had remembered him as modestly leftish and a critic of the Warren Report, so I actually took his book seriously.

If I remember the book, his central problem with a conspiracy is that the Soviets told him that LHO was not the kind of person you'd do business with (immature, lacking what an intelligence agency requires in an agent, etc). Well, if that is an accurate description of LHO at the time of his defection (and I'm not convinced that it is) he just looks like a better and better patsy. I mean, either he's interested in intrigue but not competent and therefore a perfect patsy OR interested in intrigue and capable enough to either be a witting or unwitting member of some operation that day. I don't see any headway being made for the Oswald Did It Alone crowd here.

Almost all of the Lone Nut arguments are incomprehensibly thin. The only one that really has to be answered is how LHO got the TSBD job. But, since we have ample reason to be suspicious of Ruth and Michael Paine, that one can't be thought of as a home run for them either.

I remember just jerking my head when I saw Bugliosi on C Span in my pre serious study days:

Brian Lamb: Why do you think Oswald did it alone/Why was there no conspiracy?

Bugliosi: (small nervous laugh) Well, it was his gun.

Me: This guy has a degree in something?!

Michael, Mailer was a very serious supporter of conspiracy. In 77 he had a huge party to raise money to keep HSCA alive. I was there with my then boyfriend Harvey Yazijian, of the Cambridge based Assassination Information Bureau.
The next day her had the AIB back for a full day luncheon and he was strong in his support of Conspiracy. So when he switched sides to pay the IRS. I was furious. Traitor and liar.
Dawn

[Tracy Riddle]

One of the earliest examples of big man/little man. There may be others even earlier, but you can see that this theme was in play back in December 1963:

Lee Oswald's indicated murder of Mr. Kennedy seems motivated only by his resentment against the most successful man in the world, resentment against a wonderfully intelligent, puissant, healthy, wealthy, witty and handsome man who was so rich in spirit that he made no attempt to conceal his superiority, who dominated the world and outer space, and who had an inexpressibly fine wife and two lovely children. From the view of this resentment, as long as this fellow stayed out of Lee Oswald's path he would be all right, but when he came laughing into Dallas, and the newspapers printed a map that showed he would drive right past where Lee Oswald worked for a lousy fifty bucks a week, it was more than this classical resentment could bear.
It takes time to achieve such resentment and to fire it there must be careful nurturing by constant unrelenting conditioning to violence. Oswald was not the only violence-packed American who was capable of murdering President Kennedy. The assassination was a wasteful, impersonal, senseless act, but the United States has undergone such a massive brainwashing to violence that such a senseless waste is á la mode.

Manchurian Candidate' in Dallas Richard Condon The Nation, 28 December 1963

This is the same Richard Condon who later wrote Winter Kills, where the Oswald character is clearly a patsy who only brought the rifle into the building.

[Albert Doyle]

Ironic because the real story was the old world order saw Kennedy as the upstart millionaire playboy liberal who had the nerve to shoot down the entire old establishment system as it drove past his presidency.