Read the 1983 story from author Don DeLillo that became his novel 'Libra'
A Dallas policeman holds up the rifle used to kill President John F Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Lee Harvey Oswald has been charged with the murder.Once the business in Dealey Plaza was settled — a matter of 5.6 seconds, we were told — the process of unraveling could safely begin. Men in suits and ties would evaluate eyewitness testimony, work up chronologies, clarify the human relationships.
The physical evidence contradicts itself, the eyewitness accounts do not begin to coincide. There are failures of memory, there are conflicting memories.
On April 4th, 1968, five white men sat around a circular table on the top floor of a Manhattan high-rise, playing poker. Sirens started wailing on First Avenue, police cars, fire engines, all heading uptown. The sound began to spread across the island like coded signals being sent from one neighborhood to the next. The sixth player arrived, told us Martin Luther King had been shot in Memphis .
There is the ex-marine who defected to the Soviet Union and who resembled Oswald physically. This man’s Leningrad address was found in Marina Oswald’s address book. It is not surprising that people casually acquainted with both men tended to confuse them. The paranoid doesn’t think it is overwhelmingly difficult to find the answers to such questions. He simply wonders what he will do with the answers, which agency he will take them to, knowing as he does that the FBI apparently can’t find ninety-two frames of the film in question.
He used the name Hidell to order the bolt-action rifle found in the School Book Depository and the .38 revolver that is linked to the death of Dallas policemanJ.D. Tippit. It was Oswald in the ground, all right, acting even in death and decay as his own counterpart, his own secret self.The Kennedy association was a movie. It is called the Zapruder film, and it lasts eighteen seconds at 18.3 frames per second. The film has been enhanced, stabilized, enlarged, rendered as slides and prints, reproduced two frames to a page in the Warren Report. Every murky nuance has been scrutinized for data. Valuable things have been learned — distances, locations, rates of speed.
In Hinckley and the media, we find two forces that recognize their affinity at once. Made for each other, even in the way they interpret their actions without reference to the clear and terrible result. In a year-end issue of, we find a double-page layout of more than thirty film frames documenting the Reagan shooting, with captions and a small block of print.
Lee Harvey Oswald. Raised without a father, poor, truant, bullied, judged as a teenager to be “tense, withdrawn and evasive.” As a teenager, he’s not so very hard to know. But because it is hard to get a grip on the adult, we tend to see him as a perennial drifter — drifting into the military, into this or that job, toward this or that place. He moves in an aura of vagueness, obscure motivation. He shot himself in the arm, vaguely, when he was in Japan.
Agents seem eager to be turned. In fact, nearly everyone does — technicians, diplomats, military attaches, enlisted men, every minor functionary working in a sensitive area. The air hums with casual espionage, conspiracy and treason. It is possible that technology helps create the clandestine mentality. We all go underground to some extent. In an era of the massive codification and storage of data, we are all keepers and yielders of secrets.
A study in divided loyalties, or in the irrelevance of loyalty, is George von Mohrenschildt. This is a man who befriended the Oswalds in Texas in 1962. At various times in his life he was said to be an agent of Polish, French, British and Nazi intelligence. The FBI had him figured for a Red. He comes to us bearing the credentials of multiple backgrounds and ancestries. At some point, von Mohrenschildt becomes de Mohrenschildt.
Back in the lobby, McDonald, with his keen investigative eye, wonders how a well-traveled professional like Saul could enter a smart hotel like the Westbury without wearing a tie. He also wonders who to take his story to. The answer, of course, is the American book-buying public. Nonfiction. A dollar ninety-five.This matter-of-fact description is how the FBI identified the pages of Arthur Bremer’s diary of loneliness, incompetence and sly, self-mocking humor.
“Headacke. Weakness in my heart. And a feeling like a cool wind was moving in my hands.” Milwaukee, Dearborn, Kalamazoo, Washington, Saginaw — and then Laurel, Maryland, where George Wallace, stepping away from his bulletproof podium, walks toward the grinning young man in the reflector sunglasses and the red, white and blue shirt roguishly adorned with Wallace buttons.
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