1963 Established just a week after those terrible events in Dallas, headed by the chief justice of the Supreme Court and including a former head of the CIA, the Warren Commission took evidence from 552 witnesses and reviewed over 3,100 exhibits. After ten months the report came out in 888 pages. As a character comments in Libra (1988), Don DeLillo’s masterpiece on the plot to kill Kennedy, the Warren report was the book James Joyce would have written if he’d moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred.
The report’s findings, that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone and without assistance when he shot the president from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, quickly came to be disbelieved. What about the persistent reports that shots had also come from the ‘grassy knoll’ to the right of the motorcade track? How could Oswald have got three shots spot on the target in the documented time, using an old bolt-action rifle? And how convenient that Jack Ruby, with his Mafia connections, should have been allowed into the Dallas police headquarters just two days later, only to draw a revolver and shoot Oswald dead.
To keep him from talking? Who was covering up what? That black underground river of paranoia, so abundant in America, soon boiled to the surface. A whole library of books following the assassination and its aftermath tried to implicate Cuban exiles (following the failure of the Bay of Pigs ‘invasion’), the CIA, the Mafia (in retaliation for the heat being put on the Mob by the president’s brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy), J. Edgar Hoover, Lyndon B. Johnson, the Russians, even the Israelis.
As for creative writers, the problem was, as Philip Roth had argued only three years earlier, reality in mid-century America was outpacing the imagination of the most ambitious fictioneer. ‘The actuality is constantly outdoing our talents’, he wrote, ‘and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.’1
So Norman Mailer abandoned fiction altogether for his Oswald’s Tale (1995), as he had for The Executioner’s Song (1980), his massive treatment of the Gary Gilmore story (see 17 January). James Ellroy’s American Tabloid (1995) mixes fictional characters and real-life-figures in an intricate plot involving the CIA, the FBI and the Mafia colluding over a six-year period leading up to the assassination.
The best so far has been Libra – like American Tabloid a fact-fiction, but one that deepens in seriousness because it explores paranoia within the context of plots both conspiratorial and fictional. DeLillo’s imaginative hypothesis is that the CIA made the plot to kill Kennedy look as though it came from Cuba – not to succeed but only to push him into declaring all-out war on that country. Coincidence and intention interact to turn the plan lethal, but then it is the nature of plots to run their course, and all plots lead to death.
If that were all it had to say, Libra would be a poor abstraction. Its real strength lies in old-fashioned novelistic attention to detail: what people eat and wear, the contents of their refrigerators and car boots – above all, how they speak. Marguerite, Oswald’s mother, drifts through the novel in fragments of an unstoppable address to an imagined judge (‘I am the mother in the case, your honor’). She’s strong on her dignity:
I was sitting pretty in our American slang, managing Princess Hosiery, when Mr Ekdahl proposed in the car. I made him wait a year and he was a Harvard man.
And on Lee’s care for his mother:
I have a story to tell. He came home with a birdcage that had a stand with a planter. It had ivy in the planter, it had the cage, it had the parakeet, it had a complete set of food for the parakeet. This boy bought gifts for his mother.
DeLillo used the transcripts of the Warren hearings as a contemporary reinvention of the Federal Writers’ Project life histories (see 7 July and 27 July). What he shows is that the true dialogue of the underdog is monologue, because no one cares enough to listen – let alone reply.
1 Philip Roth, ‘Writing American fiction’, in Reading Myself and Others, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975.