1992
In the wake of Harlot's Ghost, Mailer lectures at CIA headquarters to a standing-room crowd and meets Director Robert Gates. The Kennedy assassination preoccupies him: he reviews Oliver Stone's JFK, writes the imaginary play 'Earl and Lyndon,' prefaces Carl Oglesby's assassination study, and debates art and history at Town Hall. He returns to convention reporting with 'By Heaven Inspired' on the Republican Convention, eulogizes the writer Marco Vassi, and visits Wilkes University.
After Harlot’s Ghost
Much of 1992 played out in the long wake of Harlot’s Ghost. In a remarkable coda, Mailer lectured at CIA headquarters in February to a standing-room audience of 500 officials and afterward met privately with Director Robert M. Gates; with the Cold War over, he told the New York Times, “the CIA can get out of the beartrap of ideology” (92.5). He gave one of his best television interviews to David Frost (“Talking with David Frost,” aired 24 January; 92.2, 92.3), and reflected, in “Waiting for the Big One,” on the many novels he had planned but never written — the late-1950s “big novel,” the Ancient Evenings sequels, a 1966 biker novel, and an autobiographical novel of “the Mailer family back in Russia” (92.1a).
The Kennedy assassination
The Kennedy case ran through the year. Mailer reviewed Oliver Stone’s JFK in “Footfalls in the Crypt” (92.4), wrote the imaginary one-act “Earl and Lyndon” (92.8) for Vanity Fair — his last piece as the magazine’s writer-in-residence — prefaced Carl Oglesby’s The JFK Assassination (92.9), and joined Nora Ephron, Edward Jay Epstein, and Stone on a Town Hall panel on “the duty of art to history” (92.7).
Conventions, a eulogy, and Wilkes
In October The New Republic ran “By Heaven Inspired” (92.10), his nonfiction narrative of the Houston Republican Convention — a late return to the convention reporting of two decades before. He wrote a preface and eulogy for the late Marco Vassi (92.11), and the Gulf War essay “How the Wimp Won the War” was reissued as a Lord John Press limited edition (92.13). During the year he visited J. Michael Lennon‘s Wilkes University.
Related pages
- 1991 | 1993
- Harlot’s Ghost | “Footfalls in the Crypt” | “By Heaven Inspired” | Marco Vassi
- Earl and Lyndon: An Imaginary Conversation (92.8) | Preface to The JFK Assassination: The Facts and the Theories (92.9) | Preface to A Driving Passion (92.11)