Reimagining Death in Dallas LIBRA

By Paul Gray

Two facts are fairly indisputable, although someone, somewhere will provide arguments to the contrary. On Nov. 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was shot and fatally wounded while riding in a motorcade around Dealey Plaza in Dallas. Almost exactly 48 hours later, Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin, was gunned down in front of live television cameras while being transferred from one jail to another. He died shortly thereafter.

Everything else associated with these murders has long been up for grabs; understanding has been swamped by a torrent of details and speculation. The Kennedy assassination now seems to float in some peculiar, highly charged ether between fact and fiction, where logic distills into dreams. To write a novel about the deaths in Dallas seems redundant, the making up of a story about a myth.

Yet that, in Libra, is precisely what Don DeLillo has done. In a note at the end, he admits that some may find a novel on this subject "one more gloom in a chronicle of unknowing." But, he continues, "because this book makes no claim to literal truth, because it is only itself, apart and complete, readers may find refuge here -- a way of thinking about the assassination without being constrained by half-facts or overwhelmed by possibilities, by the tide of speculation that widens with the years." Unfortunately, this argument wants things both ways; a book can hardly be "only itself, apart and complete" and at the same time offer "a way of thinking" about historical figures and events. When DeLillo opens his novel with the young Oswald riding a subway, it is not as though he were creating a character from scratch; he obviously assumes that readers already have some idea who Oswald was and what he would become.

Libra is, in fact, another conspiracy theory, although considerably more literate and entertaining than most. Imagine a small cadre within the CIA angered over the Kennedy Administration's bungling of the Bay of Pigs invasion and worried that J.F.K. is making some secret accommodation with Castro. One spook hatches an idea: "We need an electrifying event." Public outrage will be fueled by an attempt on the President's life, one that can be convincingly traced to Cuba. There is an added wrinkle: "But we don't hit Kennedy. We miss him."

Needless to say, things grow far, far more complicated than this, and DeLillo develops his intricate plot with cinematic bravura. There are flashes back and forward in time, and jump cuts between the conspirators and Oswald, who is growing up to become exactly the kind of person the CIA renegades had planned to invent: a malcontent and misfit with a known fondness for Castro and guns. Slowly, dimly, Oswald begins to realize that he is being watched, people have designs on his destiny. Someone who knows what is cooking spells it out for him: "You're a quirk of history. You're a coincidence. They devise a plan, you fit it perfectly." The lecturer concludes, "There's a pattern in things."

Oddly enough, nearly everyone in the novel talks this way, as if the U.S. during the early 1960s were crawling with metaphysicians. "There's more to it, there's something we don't know about," muses a Cuban exile and hit man. "There's something they aren't telling us," says David Ferrie, a real person, now dead, familiar to conspiracy buffs. "Something we don't know about. There's more to it. There's always more to it." A CIA operative ponders, "We lead more interesting lives than we think. We are characters in plots, without the compression and numinous sheen." Even Oswald waxes philosophical: "He thought the only end to isolation was to reach the point where he was no longer separated from the true struggles that went on around him. The name we give this point is history."

At such moments, all these people sound suspiciously like DeLillo, 51, whose career has been nourished by the public disillusionment and skepticism that began to spread after the nightmare of 1963. His eight previous novels, beginning with Americana (1971), hover devotedly over repeated themes: events are never what they seem; there may be no such thing as randomness; secrets and mysteries control our lives.

Given these preoccupations, it was probably inevitable ("There's a pattern in things") that DeLillo would get around to the assassination, that nexus of | paranoia. But it is difficult to see exactly what Libra adds to this event, aside from some temporary diversion. Its argument, that the plot to kill the President was even wider and more sinister than previously imagined, will seem credible chiefly to the already converted, among whom are surely people who also believe that Martians are sending them messages through the fillings in their teeth. There is a simpler possibility that Libra inventively skirts: a frustrated, angry man looked out a window, watched the President ride by, and shot him dead.