Since The Mailer Review is a literary journal that has absolutely nothing to do with the shadowy world of conspiracy theories, it's quite synchronistic--from a cryptoscatological perspective, at least--that this particular issue should contain an article by none other than Dick Russell, author of the 1992 book The Man Who Knew Too Much (generally considered to be one of the best and most credible books about the JFK assassination). Russell's contribution to this issue, "Norman Mailer and the Dynamite Club," is a first-person account of Mailer's fascination with "the mysteries" (Mailer's term, not mine), which apparently included not just the JFK assassination but related government conspiracies as well. "The Dynamite Club" was a series of informal gatherings that Mailer organized to help further his research into the national security state while working on Harlot's Ghost, his epic 1991 novel about the history of the CIA told from the point of view of a secret agent based loosely on the life and career of James Jesus Angleton, chief of the CIA's counterintelligence staff for over twenty years (from 1954 to 1975).
According to Russell, meetings of the Dynamite Club were attended by such luminaries as Bernard Fensterwald (attorney for James Earl Ray), Jim Hougan (author of Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat, and the CIA), Edward Jay Epstein (author of Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald), Kevin Coogan (author of Dreamer of the Day: Franics Parker Yockey and the Postwar International), Don DeLillo (author of Libra, a novel that focuses on the life of Lee Harvey Oswald), James Grady (author of the espionage novel The Six Days of the Condor), Robert Gettlin (co-author of Silent Coup: The Removal of a President) and Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy. Dick Russell offers the reader the opportunity to be a fly on the wall of these alcohol-laden meetings.
The cover of the latest issue, drawn by Jules Feiffer, can be seen below....
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