This is one of Mailer's most questionable achievements, and certainly it did not convince me that Lee Harvey Oswald, the supposed killer of President Kennedy, deserved all of its 800 odd pages. It has been claimed from time to time that he was a double agent, that he was the witless assassin for interests ranging from Castro to the FBI, etc, but the probable truth is that Oswald was simply a failure and a misfit. The book is poorly presented, with a rather confused time sequence and a dense mass of quotes, documents and recorded conversations, few of which appear to shed much new light either on Oswald's odd, mixed up personality or on the historical fatality for which he was responsible.