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Kosinski faults himself and Abbott's other literary friends. "We pretended he had always been a writer. It was a fraud. It was like the '60s, when we embraced the Black Panthers in that moment of radical chic without understanding their experience." There is another analogy from the 1960s, when Conservative Writer William F. Buckley Jr. championed the cause of a literarily gifted convicted killer, Edgar Smith, and helped set him at liberty to attempt murder again. Years later, Buckley acknowledged in an article how easily conned and naive he had been. Mailer, whose writings attest to his fascination with outlaws, has made only one comment on the Abbott affair: "A tragic situation all around."
—By Claudia Wolffs.
Reported by Dean Brelis/New York