Contents
Bullets 1–4. Men in Small Rooms
Bullets 5–8. Known and Unknown
Bullets 9–12. The Eye and the Hand
Appendix I. Don DeLillo, Libra. New York: Viking Press, 1988.
Appendix II. Suddenly. Directed by Lewis Allen. United Artists, 1954.
Appendix III. Andy Warhol, Jackie (The Week That Was), 1963. Acrylic, oil, and screen print ink on canvas, 64 × 80 in.
Appendix IV. Cy Twombly, Nine Discourses on Commodus, 1963. Oil, pencil, and wax crayon on canvas, 9 parts, each 52 ¾ × 80 in.
Exhibit A. Photo of Dealey Plaza from the Texas School Book Depository, November 1963
Exhibit B. Photo of the lobby entrance of the Texas School Book Depository, November 1963
Exhibit C. Photo of a stairwell in the Texas School Book Depository, November 1963
Exhibit D. Photo of the stairs from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, November 1963
Exhibit E. Photo of the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, November 1963
Exhibit F. Photo of the sniper’s nest on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, November 1963
Appendix I. Don DeLillo, Libra. New York: Viking Press, 1988.
Covert beneath the dust jacket—bearing a photo of Lee Harvey Oswald with leftist literature and Carcano rifle—the first edition of Don DeLillo’s Libra is embossed with zodiacal scales, the fulcrum level with Oswald’s head on the paper above: “Which way will Leon tilt?”1
DeLillo relishes recounting that President John F. Kennedy’s assassination took place on 11/22. Encompassing the events leading up to and directly following that date, Libra is structured around a two-ness that hints at dialectical correspondences: murderer and victim; thesis and antithesis; fiction and reality. Kennedy was a Gemini; for him, the Roman numerals stood at attention. Oswald was a Libra; for him, the numerals lay down. This plot ends in two pairs of men—Oswald : Kennedy :: Ruby : Oswald.
In “American Blood,” the Rolling Stone essay that preceded Libra, DeLillo presents Oswald as Kennedy’s double, his “secret sharer,” linked by an indefatigable pull toward death.2 The Warren Commission was appointed to identify those responsible for the murders of both men, the life of a president put in the balance with that of a “nobody from nowhere.” DeLillo’s Kennedy and Oswald are haunted by doppelgangers, foils scattering a paranoiac wealth of facsimiles in their wakes: John, Jack, and Lancer; Lee Oswald, Leon Oswald, H. O. Lee, Alek J. Oswald, Osborne, Alek James Hidell (rhy. Fidel).3 Nicholas Branch—the fictitious CIA analyst tasked with writing the sub rosa history of the assassination—is confounded by the photographic evidence. Everybody looks like Oswald except the man himself. (Cf. Luigi Mangione.) Likewise, minor characters speculate that the president is surrounded by a coterie of replicas, a form of visual interference broadcast to the volatile masses.
Exhibit A. Photo of Dealey Plaza from the Texas School Book Depository, November 1963
Bullets 1–4. Men in Small Rooms
- DeLillo’s Libra is a book about the entanglement of reading, writing, and living. It is about the creation of plots and characters, the introduction of a catalyzing force and its denouement. In the mind of DeLillo’s invented CIA agent Win Everett, the narrative problem is the normalization of relations between the U.S. and Castro’s Cuba. The resolution is an “electrifying event,” keyed to open the door to intervention—an attempt on the life of the president. In a scatter of forged “pocket litter” and false names redolent of socialist sympathies, Everett and other alumni of the Bay of Pigs fabricate their would-be gunman as a novelist would sketch a protagonist. Everett is shocked to learn that his character is real. Oswald’s actuality intimates something about our binary world of forking paths: as if, in the immensity of data that constitutes modern life, there had to be one person who checked all of Everett’s boxes. DeLillo’s Oswald doesn’t kill JFK, though not for lack of trying. He’s framed—a “patsy,” as the real Oswald cried out to the press in his last hours on earth—by the intricate machinations of wayward CIA operatives, Cuban paramilitary organizations, and New Orleans mafiosi.
- Our animal instincts object to confinement, to staying indoors too long. It’s bad for the body and the mind. In her testimony before the Warren Commission, Oswald’s Russian-born wife Marina said of her husband’s long nights alone in Dallas, “I told him that he should not stay in his room too much.”4 The characters of Libra are often confined to cramped cubic allocations, slender sets of coordinates on the grid. After the Bay of Pigs, the CIA relegates Everett to an academic role at Texas Woman’s University; “buried” in the basement of the Old Main building, he conceives the attempted assassination. Oswald passes through a sequence of “stunted rooms”—the Bronx basement of his childhood, the military prison at Atsugi Naval Base, the impersonal social housing of Moscow and Minsk, a cramped apartment in New Orleans, and, in Dallas and Fort Worth, stints in borrowed bedrooms and temporary lodging. The day before he shot Kennedy, Oswald asked Marina to move to Dallas with him; DeLillo’s fictive Lee tells her, “I can’t live in that room too much longer.”5 Decades later, Branch combs exhaustively through the minutiae of evidence, reconstructing the scene in retrospect; he lives in “the room where it has taken him all these years to learn that his subject is not politics or violent crime but men in small rooms.”
- Prison cells, bedrooms, offices. DeLillo has a pet theory about small rooms and those captive within them. The small room is a confrontation with the psyche and with sweeping ideas: providence, memory, power. It deprives its inhabitant and separates them from the world; yet it also protects, like the controlled environment of an experiment, an incubation space for contagions and ideas. Comparing his own imprisonment at Atsugi with those of the great communist leaders, DeLillo’s Oswald understands this disempowerment as a subsumption into the inexorable currents of communism and history, a step away from the room of the self. Libra’s epigraph quotes from a letter the real Oswald sent to his brother: “Happiness is taking part in the struggle, where there is no borderline between one’s own personal world, and the world in general.” A Herostratus of the modern age, Oswald’s biography is laced with delusions of grandeur; the so-called historic diary suggests an audience to come, the centimeters of its pages conscientiously crammed for later study.6 In the garden photos, he holds the rifle coolly, posed like John Wayne. The images are another offering for the analysts and conspiracy theorists: “He wanted to give them something to uncover, a layer to strip away.”
- DeLillo has described himself as a man in a small room. Indeed, many of the humble occupants of confined spaces in his books are writers. The protagonist of Mao II, which directly followed Libra, is a novelist who intends never to publish his manuscript. He lives beside the slow accumulation of words, which fill his house like the stream of sand into an hourglass. He believes there’s a kinship between novelists and terrorists. CIA analyst Branch seems like a prototype for this later character, ensconced within his “career of paper,” creating a work to rival that abecedarium of secrecy in excess, the Warren Report, with its nine-hundred pages and twenty-six volumes of addenda and exhibits. He compresses reader and writer, operating as a twofold surrogate within the plot—for DeLillo and for us. Writers, like lone gunmen, are compulsive worldbuilders; they write their own past, present, and future. DeLillo rarely partook in interviews prior to Libra. The year of its release, he gave ten, a form of testimony parallel to that which furnished the voices and facts of the book—an extension of the assassination’s appendices. In Libra, Branch believes the “past is changing as he writes.” Andy Warhol said, “History books are being rewritten all the time.”
Exhibit B. Photo of the lobby entrance of the Texas School Book Depository, November 1963
Appendix II. Suddenly. Directed by Lewis Allen. United Artists, 1954.
During Marina Oswald’s hearing, Solicitor General J. Lee Rankin expressed a particular interest in the television programs and films that Lee watched in the weeks leading up to the murder. Cut to Libra. In a dark living room, illuminated only by the modulated flicker of a screen, Marina and Lee watch television. Marina, immensely pregnant, nods off; her head rests in his lap as Suddenly begins. In the film, Frank Sinatra plays a charming mercenary, sent by shadowy authorities to kill the U.S. president. The theater of action is a living room with a window overlooking the train depot, where the president’s special express is soon scheduled to arrive. Before a captive audience—the owners of the home he has appropriated, the television viewers’ proxies—Sinatra sermonizes: “When you’ve got a gun you are a sort of God.… The gun gives you the power of life and death.” Caught up in his metaphor, he adds, “I can loose the lightning.”
The film’s plot is betrayed by a television. Slyly, the hostage grandfather conspires to hook the 5000 volt main plate lead to the metal table on which Sinatra’s gun is mounted. He completes his trap by spilling water over the sniper’s position. When Sinatra’s associate grips the gun, his body completes a closed circuit; wracked by electricity, his hands convulsively grip the trigger, loosing several rounds into gray, static heavens. The shots are enough to warn away the incoming train, and the president is saved. Nonetheless, watching this, DeLillo’s Oswald is rapt; he feels that mysterious entities are “running a message through the night into his skin.” This fiction has a bearing on his reality. It is its own insidious virus, as communicable and deadly as a biological weapon; parallel claims have been made of communism itself—a European invention conceived to bring Russia to its knees.
DeLillo makes Oswald a spectator to the assassination itself, his view toward the grassy knoll angled through the telescopic sight of his rifle on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Through the objective lens, he sees his bullets pierce Kennedy’s neck and Senator Connally’s chest. But in DeLillo’s telling, the third, fatal shot was not Oswald’s. Lee watches. His crosshair tracks the back of Kennedy’s head in a reticular motif to rival the DuMont TV calibration pattern. He has not pulled the trigger, yet the roseate hues of blood and bone enter his pupil as light through glass.
Oswald is invented by television; in the end, it devours him. Live news cameras captured Jack Ruby as he lunged from the crush of reporters in the basement of the Dallas Police Headquarters, the Colt Cobra revolver held outstretched. When the gun went off at point blank range, the shot registered in Oswald’s face: eyes seamed into two thin lines, mouth an ovoid echo of the wound below. In the video tape footage, the moment before it happens, the slim body of a journalist’s microphone glistens like the barrel of a gun. In the days following, Oswald expired over and again on televisions across America, unknown in life and infamous in death.
Exhibit C. Photo of a stairwell in the Texas School Book Depository, November 1963
Bullets 5–8. Known and Unknown
- The twelfth appendix of the Warren Report concerns speculations and rumors. Its paragraphs rhythmically alternate between hearsay and the corresponding investigative conclusions with a finality that brooks no middle ground in the “easy sway of either/or.”7 In Libra, the contours of the real are less forthcoming. The book is an umbracle for gradations of in-between: secrecy, lies, faith, and fantasy. As Russ Knight, AKA the Weird Beard, quips on Dallas’s KLIF AM waves, “There are only two things in the world. Things that are true. And things that are truer than true.”
- DeLillo’s characters drift through a Pynchonian mist of contradictory data.8 In Libra, chapter headings begin with places or dates, but never both, as though governed by some scientific principle of indeterminacy. According to DeLillo, the Warren Report is chock-full of discrepancies, down to Oswald’s height, preferred hand, and ability with a gun. CIA analyst Branch ceases to believe in the human capacity “to determine weight, mass, and direction, to see things as they are, recall them clearly, be able to say what happened.”
- The mind is still more mysterious. When DeLillo’s Oswald is thrown into the brig at Atsugi, he and his cellmate Bobby Dupard discuss the offenses that landed them there. Oswald asks whether Dupard is guilty of the crime for which he is charged. The other man answers, “I could go either way and be convinced in my own mind.” The senses are colored by need, desire, and fear—the illusive veil through which we perceive our world. In the words of fictional CIA supervisor Laurence Parmenter, “the heart breeds a deception so mysterious and complex it can only be taken for a deeper kind of truth.”9
- In the face of uncertainty, there emerge two camps—those who wish to know beyond the shadow of doubt and those who are content in ignorance. In fiction and reality, Jack Ruby desired desperately to authenticate his testimony with the polygraph test (even at the time, controversial for its unreliability); his hearing before the Warren Commission was starred by these appeals to a higher form of knowledge, one not subject to the meteorological fluctuations of zeitgeist.10 However, those who know most understand best the power of knowing little. In an age of U.S. intervention and intelligence, when conflicts among the great powers more closely resemble games of chess than ground maneuvers, secret-keeping is fraught with responsibility—seepage becomes a matter of life and death. For the CIA, “details were a form of contamination,” and, in relation to the agency’s subterranean plots, “the White House was to be the summit of unknowing.” Conspiracy thrived in this moonless environment of subtle choreographies and disinformation both willful and accidental.
Exhibit D. Photo of the stairs from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, November 1963
Appendix III. Andy Warhol, Jackie (The Week That Was), 1963. Acrylic, oil, and screen print ink on canvas, 64 × 80 in.
The grid surveys and compresses reality. Its cells gather data, annotate equivalencies and differences. Bouffant hair and wide-set eyes repeat across the frames of a four by four grid. Within, Jacqueline Kennedy’s features are close-cropped, excised from their setting and arranged in a proliferating Rorschach pattern of pairs. In the top left, she looks at us head-on, face folded into a pressroom smile, eyes half-closed against the double blindnesses of sun and flash on Dallas’s Love Field. In every other frame, we find her markedly transformed, eyes downcast, mouth grave—after the event. On the bottom right, she’s witness to the oath on Air Force One, head angled down, cheeks hollowed by exhaustion. The fact of her doubling underscores Jack’s absence. The king is dead, long live the king. Eyes just visible under the sweep of hair meet her own gaze in a mirroring image, foreheads nearly touching in intimate colloquy. Though we can’t see it, she’s still wearing the pink wool suit, stained red. In the set of prints above, she pivots blithely from herself, stare fixed, washed out by overexposure. She is beside herself. She circles herself, turns away. She’s distant, somewhere else: still in the backseat of a 1961 Lincoln Continental, holding bits of her husband’s brain in her hands.
In The Word, the Image, the Gun—a 1991 BBC documentary on DeLillo—the interleaving gazes of Warhol’s painting appear in miniature, pinned to the corkboard at a staged recreation of the author’s desk from the Libra years. Warhol painted Jackie (The Week That Was) (1963) in the month following JFK’s assassination.11 The former First Lady’s features narrate those four days in November 1963, splashed across a lattice of rectangles reminiscent of the tabloids and magazines from which the images were drawn. Like many of Warhol’s works, the silkscreen painting fits uneasily between the artist’s series: Jackie is an icon of both celebrity and disaster. She is American aspiration and desire incarnate—hopelessly entwined with the seductive fascination of death.12
Exhibit E. Photo of the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, November 1963
Appendix IV. Cy Twombly, Nine Discourses on Commodus, 1963. Oil, pencil, and wax crayon on canvas, 9 parts, each 52 ¾ × 80 in.
Libra’s opening scene divulges Oswald in youth—a delinquent riding the rails of New York City’s subway. The screeching speed of the train fuses with the vertiginous movement of the bullet through the barrel of Oswald’s Italian army-surplus rifle. It’s a passage of years, a fateful momentum through the murky halls of time. DeLillo’s description of the impact is sublime—the bullet does not exist beyond the color and form of its effects, a material aesthetic that emphasizes the meat of the body after the mind has absented itself. As Branch describes ballistics tests run on gelatin molds fitted in undershirts, button-ups, and suit jackets, “It is pure modernist sculpture.”
Cy Twombly’s Nine Discourses on Commodus (1963) is a Zapruder film in paint, an abstracted nine-panel portrait of the eponymous emperor, whose reign marked the end of the Pax Romana. In each oblong canvas—cut to anatomical height—two expressionistic clouds of paint commune in the atmospheric expanse of a foggy, monochrome background. In the first panel, the twinned nebulous shapes are superimposed with the logic-laden contours of a graphite grid. Above them, the blurred velocity of a long, bullet-tapered shape darts across a chart that repeats in several panels, though its numeric sequence is never the same. The cool equanimity of the first composition is shattered in the next by an incarnadine spray. Many-hued reds blight the surface in messy parallel swipes, a cloudburst of viscera jumping with projectile dollops and wads. The lower border of the third panel is marked by a grisly signature of red finger and thumb prints.
Commodus was well-liked by the popular and military classes, subject of a personality cult that often depicted him in the guise of Hercules. However, his conflicts with the senatorial order drove him to tyrannical control, and he was killed by his wrestling partner Narcissus—a fleshly echo—in a plot devised by his closest advisors. Created in December 1963 after the murder of America’s vigorous young president and amid a growing tide of conspiracy theories, some implicating the CIA, Twombly’s Discourses prophetically links the paranoia of the present with that of a distant past, marking a threshold in U.S. history and contemporary consciousness.13 A former military cryptographer, Twombly inscribes the work with the diagrammatic trappings of knowledge systems—grids, charts, diagrams—articulating counterpoints of structure and chaos, analysis and intuition, the disintegration of the grid in a frantic confusion of paint.
Exhibit F. Photo of the sniper’s nest on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, November 1963
Bullets 9–12. The Eye and the Hand
- Early in Libra, as Win Everett muses on the holiness of secrecy, he speaks flippantly to his wife. She pouts playfully, but he, concerned he has offended, reaches out and touches her arm. This gesture wards off, if only for an instant, the dangers both psychological and real carried with his hidden life. “Trust my hands, my touch.” (Machiavelli tells us that only too few are able to judge by hand; the eye reigns supreme, though it is the more vulgar instrument.)
- DeLillo sets up his world of intrigues and doubles, his totalizing simulation, only to erode it. “Look, touch, this is the true nature of the event. Not your beautiful ambiguities, your lives of the major players, your compassions and sadnesses….There are no contradictions here. Your history is simple. See, the man on the slab.” Libra closes on the funerals of Kennedy and Oswald, their bodies weighted and real, subject to gravity and entropy. Though the body is possessed by its own emergent compulsions and irrepressible spasms, its deeds remain the only recourse against the shadow realm of the mind.
- Today, the original crime scene—the Texas School Book Depository’s sixth level—is a museum dedicated to the assassination. In its collection, cut from the walls during renovation, are entire window frames, tin ceiling tiles, and plaster Corinthian capital pieces, all contemporaneous to 1963. There are wood floorboards from the seventh story, scored and scuffed by industrial equipment and the hard soles of work boots. The scratches are tactile, indexical, real. This place exists, existed.
- FBI photos of the sniper’s nest from the days following the shooting unfold like a point and click adventure. We start at the building’s southeast window. Through gaps in a barricade of stacked and stamped book boxes—more grids—we can make out figures on the sidewalk, the glint of water in a streetside fountain, hints of landscaped ground cover. Our view draws back, flash failing to illuminate the shoddy planes of the sixth floor, the dark expanse littered with bright motes that register static-fast fibers clinging to the enlarged negative. The frame turns, winding through the stairwell, then down to the lobby. A radiator is doubled in the reflective glass of the doorway. Outside, we can see a man walking beneath the oak trees, a cluster of people on the plaza lawn, a police officer bent to some task. It’s all gleaming, awash in light. We’re on the street, walking away, leaving those narrow halls behind. The luminous haze of Dallas’s skyline is overexposed, untranslatable into information. Our eyes close against the glare.
- Though there’s no etymological validity to the comparison, it is satisfying to note that the Latin librarius means “relating to books.” Libra, of course, is Latin for “balance” or “scales.” ↩︎
- Don DeLillo, “American Blood: A Journey Through the Labyrinth of Dallas and the Kennedy Assassination,” Rolling Stone, December 8, 1983. ↩︎
- The Warren Report notes, “Numerous people claimed to have seen Oswald or Ruby at various times and places in the United States or abroad…. Still others assumed from a widely published picture that Oswald was standing on the steps of the entrance to the Texas School Book Depository at the time the President was shot.” Warren Commission, Report of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964), 638. ↩︎
- Warren Commission, Hearings Before the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, vol. 1, 58 (testimony of Marina Oswald). ↩︎
- Lee said he would rent the apartment the next day. Marina said no. It was only after the FBI came that she realized he had placed his wedding ring by her bedside when he left that morning. ↩︎
- As Marina testified to the Warren Commission, “From everything I know about my husband…he wanted in any way, whether good or bad, to do something that would make him outstanding, that he would be known in history.” Warren Commission, Hearings, vol. 1, 76 (testimony of Marina Oswald). ↩︎
- Don DeLillo, The Body Artist (New York: Scribner, 2001). ↩︎
- See also Suspended Reason and RIP DCB, “The Whisper Network Electrified: An Interview with ‘Mike Antenna,’” Cleveland Review of Books, February 27, 2024, https://www.clereviewofbooks.com/the-whisper-network-electrified/. ↩︎
- Parmenter is based on E. Howard Hunt, a CIA officer credited with bringing about the 1954 Guatemalan coup d’etat through radio broadcasts that spread rumors, anti-leftist malcontent, and misinformation. Like his invented alias, Hunt was also involved in the Bay of Pigs. ↩︎
- “It is unfair to me unless I get all the facilities to back up what I say,” Ruby pleads. Warren Commission, Hearings, vol. 5, 193 (testimony of Jack Ruby). ↩︎
- The painting’s title is a beheaded version of That Was the Week That Was (sometimes abbreviated TW3), a satirical television program that abandoned its usual humor for a special November 23, 1963 broadcast on the eve of the president’s death. ↩︎
- Warhol was subject to his own assassination attempt five years later at the hands of radical feminist Valerie Solanas. ↩︎
- The comparison of JFK to Commodus was poorly received by the art establishment. For more on the work’s reception see Elizabeth Wiet, “To Rage Against the Dying of the Light: On Reza Abdoh and Cy Twombly,” in Maximalism: An Art of the Minor (PhD diss., Yale University, 2024), Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations, 1264, https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1264. ↩︎
Nicole Kaack
Nicole Kaack is an independent writer, editor, and curator.