Letter to Eiichi Yamanishi (15 December 1963)
Mailer straightens out a Japanese-rights tangle with the Tuttle firm (giving Yamanishi final say), then turns to Kennedy's assassination in an extended, Marxist-inflected reflection: Kennedy 'opened the way... for dramatic, even radical, changes in the superstructure,' and his own shift from outsider to feared Establishment figure now feels imperiled.
Mailer answers Yamanishi‘s questions about the agent Scott Meredith and apologizes for a foreign-rights snarl with the Tuttle firm, promising (in a dated postscript) to give Yamanishi “complete and final say-so on all Japanese matters.” The letter’s heart is its reflection on Kennedy’s assassination: Mailer, “too depressed to write more than a paragraph” (the New York Review of Books tribute, “The Fate of the Union”), argues in Marxist terms that while Kennedy “did nothing to shift the nature of productive relations, he opened the way… for dramatic, even radical, changes in the superstructure,” and that his own recent shift from “psychic guerilla leader” to “feared leader of the literary Establishment” may now be “smashed altogether.”