AN “ALLEGEDLY” or two should suffice in retelling the yarns in ’60s counterculture publisher Paul Krassner’s memoir Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut. Our favorite: he allegedly took LSD with Groucho Marx, who allegedly returned from the bathroom allegedly remarking that “the whole human body is a goddam miracle.” But how can we paraphrase Krassner’s most notorious piece of writing, the 1967 parody of William Manchester’s “The Death of a President,” which ensured Krassner would never again be welcome in decent journalistic company? “The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book” momentarily gulled even sophisticated readers of Krassner’s magazine, The Realist, into thinking it was the real thing. Krassner had a dead-on ear for the tone of sober political reportage, and he escalated from plausibly scandalous anecdotes to an account of the Dallas-to-Washington flight during which Lyndon Johnson (yes, yes, allegedly) had necrophiliac congress with the bullet wound in JFKs neck. Asked why he’d published such a thing, Krassner made the setup of a dirty joke into a Zen koan: “To separate the men from the boys.”
Krassner served his publishing apprenticeship under Lyle Stuart in his muckraking days; he also wrote for Mad. The sub-Swiftean fancy about LBJ (boiled down, Krassner writes, from a friend’s “stoned rap”) reflected both influences, as well as that of his friend Lenny Bruce. (“You better bring me that this minute!” Bruce allegedly yelled when Krassner’s dog allegedly ran off with Bruce’s hypodermic in its mouth.) The mix of porn, politics and conspiracy theory also gave a hint of where Krassner’s life was heading. He briefly worked for Larry Flynt at Hustler, he just missed being indicted along with the Chicago Seven and, he now acknowledges, he went “over the edge” in his obsession with conspiracies. Krassner says he lost his sanity when he lost his sense of humor; his “Confessions” prove he’s got them back.
