Libra – Don DeLillo, 1988 ★½

Conspiracy? Lone Gunman? Why Not Both?

If only every awful moment in history was as suited for fictionalization as the assassination of John F. Kennedy, with its strange characters, bizarre circumstances, and world-changing events.

Of course, many – perhaps even a majority – of Americans say that already happened with an outlandishly false and ridiculous piece of writing called the Warren Commission Report. In Libra, Don DeLillo dubs the Report “the Joycean Book of America…the novel in which nothing is left out.”

DeLillo may not believe the details of the Warren Report and its lone-gunman scenario, but the Report’s vacuuming up of byzantine and sometimes-contradictory details clearly infused the creation of Libra, not to mention its title character, known to history as Lee Harvey Oswald.

Oswald in custody, after the assassination of President Kennedy. Image from https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/11/06/jfk-files-cia-started-disavow-knowledge-lee-harvey-oswald-within-hours-killihttps-presto-gannettdigi/835030001/.

Oswald in Libra is a split personality, twisted narcissist and utopian dreamer, who in one of his most famous portraits (reproduced on the first-edition dust jacket) is a half-shadow clutching a rifle and Marxist magazines. After Oswald defects to the Soviet Union, but before he renounces that defection, a KGB officer offers his impressions:

Unknowing, partly knowing, knowing but not saying, the boy had a quality of trailing chaos behind him, causing disasters without seeing them happen, making riddles of his life and possibly fools of us all.

Libra presents him as a very conflicted character. Reading it left me conflicted, too: I admired the depth of research and how DeLillo chewed into complex themes. But the deeper the story went, the less I enjoyed it.

This is one of those postmodern novels that gets foggier as it goes on.

John F. Kennedy seen shortly before his murder, next to Jackie. In front of them is Nellie Connally, whose husband, Texas Governor John Connally, was also shot. Image from https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/22/kennedy-assassination-conspiracy-theorists-release-jfk-files. 

The story follows Oswald from growing up in the Bronx (in the same neighborhood and at the same time as DeLillo) through to his last moments on earth, on a stretcher en route to Dallas’s Parkland Hospital after being shot by Jack Ruby.

Regarding Oswald’s guilt or innocence, it’s complicated.

Typically, people who debate what happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963 fall into two camps: Those who think Kennedy was murdered as part of a large, well-organized conspiracy which set Oswald up as a patsy; and those who think Oswald acted alone.

DeLillo presents what might be called a hybrid. There is a conspiracy, but a rather haphazard one run by a cabal of disaffected cast-offs. Oswald is part of this conspiracy, yet stands apart from it, too.

Author Don DeLillo got Libra published in time for the 25th anniversary of the Kennedy Assassination. More than 30 years since, the questions seem no closer to being resolved. Image from https://rhystranter.com/2015/07/20/don-delillo-interview-research-libra-kennedy-assassination/.

In an Author’s Note, DeLillo admits to being more interested in a fictional exploration of themes raised by the Kennedy assassination than developing a cogent “whodunit” theory. His Oswald is a pawn of destiny, set in motion not by an evil government but something more mysterious existing somewhere beyond the realm of reason.

A CIA analyst named Branch reviews the case from a lonely room decades later to put it all in context for us:

We are characters in plots, without the compression and numinous sheen. Our lives, examined carefully in all their affinities and links, abound with suggestive meaning, with themes and involute turnings we have not allowed ourselves to see completely.

Sure, I guess it can feel like that, looking at one’s journey from any set end point. But is life ever that preordained?

It is in Libra. Oswald obeys his many self-destructive tics and quirks, family heirlooms from his solipsistic mother, Marguerite. Jack Ruby is a proud Jew and a proud American who can’t stop digging himself into a deeper hole trying to make clear there is no contradiction there.

Jack Ruby poses with two of his dancers at the Carousel Club in Dallas. In Libra Ruby is always on the go, a hothead but also a softie who invites drifters into his club on slow nights – and beats them up if they get fresh with the wait staff. Image from http://jfkassassination.net/ruby4.htm. 

Walter “Win” Everett Jr., a CIA spook sent into disgraced semi-retirement after the Bay of Pigs disaster, hatches the conspiracy to kill Kennedy, only his idea is “a spectacular miss” that can be pinned on Fidel Castro. When the plan moves toward murder, Everett becomes fatalistic: “There is a tendency of plots to move toward death.”

Everett is a fictional character; not so David Ferrie, ex-seminarian and airline pilot who remains a longtime flashpoint of conspiracy theories. Here Ferrie brings Oswald in on Everett’s plot and tells the young man he has no choice but to see it through to its bitter, deadly end, even though Oswald has no beef with the President:

“Think of two parallel lines. One is the life of Lee H. Oswald. One is the conspiracy to kill the President. What bridges the space between them? What makes a connection inevitable? There is a third line. It comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of the self… It has no history that we can recognize or understand. But it forces a connection. It puts a man on the path of his destiny.”

At another point in the book, midway through a seduction attempt, Ferrie gives Oswald some marijuana and then points out how “hashish” and “assassin” use the same root word. History’s David Ferrie was more than a bit of a nut; here he’s a bit of a philosopher, mocking his own appearance as he wears a bad wig to cover but not hide his alopecia: “God made me a clown, so I clown it up.” 

David Ferrie (inset) and as seen in a 1955 photo with Lee Harvey Oswald. Ferrie's actual relationship with Oswald is much debated. In Libra, the two meet when Ferrie tries to sell Oswald a broken rifle. Later, they reconnect as Ferrie works on the plot to kill Kennedy. Image from https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/616219161492986931/.

In this book, subtext matters more than context; preordination more than willpower. Everyone has their own strings to be pulled, yet there is no clear puppetmaster at work, only subterranean impulses to obey.

Libra begins in a subway and ends in an underground garage. What goes on at the surface is never as important. “There was a world inside the world,” becomes one of Libra’s many repeated mantras.

If DeLillo went all the way with a grander conspiracy, or else presented Oswald as lone nut, the result might have gained clarity and drive. But Libra is not constructed as a thriller or mystery. DeLillo instead ponders the basic strangeness of American life in the middle of the 20^th century, what happens when the American dream goes south:

…idealists of course are unpredictable. They tend to be the ones who turn bitter overnight, deceived by lies they’ve told themselves.

On December 29, 1962, Cuban anti-Castro revolutionaries captured at the Bay of Pigs and later ransomed by the U. S. were honored by President Kennedy in Miami. Libra depicts the bitter feelings many of these men carried for Kennedy's failure to support them in the invasion. Image from http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/baypigs-4.htm.

Oswald and the others we meet aren’t characters so much as philosophical constructs. Welcome to postmodernism.

Libra does have its strengths. DeLillo’s factual grasp of the case is strong enough for him to riff off of its details effectively, with many call-outs buffs will notice. Deciding to play ball with the FBI and get them off his back (he is a former defector now trying to raise a family), Oswald visits 544 Camp Street in New Orleans to make the acquaintance of private detective Guy Banister, whom the FBI want Oswald to keep an eye on.

Banister is in on the conspiracy, provided Kennedy is killed, not merely shot at. He hates the President for his civil-rights record and his white teeth. Banister’s equally-racist secretary and mistress, Delphine Roberts, meanwhile makes small talk with Ferrie:

“Why do you think a Negro would want to be a communist? Isn’t it enough for them being colored? Why would they want a communistic tinge added on?”

DeLillo employs such known figures well; others less so. George de Mohrenschildt dabbles in espionage and takes a strange interest in Oswald, but his role here is if anything harder to square than it is in the real record. Clay Shaw, the only man ever charged for Kennedy’s murder and a key figure in the movie JFK, released two years after this book, gets but the briefest cameo here.

One mystery of the Warren Commission Report explored in Libra is the profusion of Oswald "doubles," like this fellow in Mexico City photographed by the CIA and wrongly identified as Oswald after the assassination. Image from https://www.maryferrell.org/pages/Oswald_in_Mexico_City.html

The best part of Libra is its beginning. When we first meet Oswald, a teenager riding a subway, the sound of the metal wheels on the rail are so loud “he could almost taste it, like a toy you put in your mouth when you are little.”

Jack Ruby shows up rather late but makes the biggest impression, scarfing down Preludins and handing out cards for his sleazy nightclubs.

A pair of strippers discuss Ruby backstage:

“I guarantee he will ask these questions. ‘How surprised would you be if someone told you I’m a queer?’ ‘Do I talk the way a queer might talk if he was trying to hide it, or what?’”

“What am I supposed to tell him?” Lynette said.

“Doesn’t make the slightest little difference. This is just Jack.”

Ruby gives Libra much of its humor, though less the funny than the sardonic kind. As the man who shot Oswald, Ruby’s role is a needed point of focus. Yet DeLillo connects him to the conspiracy only in a very ad-hoc way involving mob loans. If Oswald’s rationale for his actions here seems strained, Ruby’s is even harder to understand.

Again, Libra is not a hypothesis for solving one of history’s great mysteries. Rather, it is a dark exploration of a different time in American life; its story concerns are philosophical rather than forensic. The fact it doesn’t work as a story seems besides the point to DeLillo, who might say the same of life. But a novel should do more than riff off the factual record; Libra comes off in the end like a big shrug and a dead end.