Robert Mayer's I, JFK is narrated by JFK in what he describes as an "emotional mosaic." This is a richly comic work, powered by the verbal wit of the narrator, who deploys farce, parody, burlesque, caricature, and travesty. The real presidential assassin was none other than JFK's half-brother, a midget named Arthur King, the illegitimate child of Joseph P. Kennedy and a Hollywood starlet. In the Texas Book Depository, King is stationed on Lee Harvey Oswald's shoulder and his phenomenally accurate shots do the work. The midget is also a multiple agent--employed by the CIA, the Russians, Castro, and anti-Castro forces--and lives happily ever after on the trust fund set up for him by his father.

The central conceit is that the powers that be permit JFK 25 more years of hindsight from the day of his death. Thus the narrator lives fictionally until November 22, 1988. In the time and space allotted, JFK goes over the familiar ground of his history, including his relations with his brothers Joe, Jr., and Bobby; with his tyrannical father; with his valet, Raymond; with Adlai Stevenson; and, centrally, with Jackie. In addition, in his scattershot manner, he reviews and comments on a dizzying array of topics: Cuba, Russia, Vietnam, and, repeatedly, Lyndon Johnson, over whose country-boy character he scores wittily. In the end, heaven then "assumes" him, and "the rest is silence."

The famous Kennedy wit and rhetorical skill are deftly parodied, and scatology is freely deployed. Johnson asks JFK to see tapes of the president in bed with Inga, an alleged former spy for Adolf Hitler, to which JFK replies, "I never promised you a Berchtesgaden." Again, when Johnson angrily declares that JFK is considered a "grace" and he "a clod," JFK answers: "A myth is as good as a mile, Lyndon Baines." Likening his brother Joe to Tarzan and himself to Hamlet, he remarks: "It's ambition, not conscience, that makes cowards of us all."

Ultimately, Mayer's work is subversive; the book insists that the Kennedy phenomenon--the glamorous and scandalous life and the murky but shocking assassination--is a subject fit for its epigraph by Gene Fowler: Tragedy is not always veiled in black. A more apt epigraph might have been a play on Karl Marx's dictum that history is played out twice--once as tragedy and once as farce.

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