This blog has not devoted much attention to historical anniversaries, but I must make an exception for one just past—the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963. I must inquire on behalf of all who are likely to recall the precise circumstances of the day with a sharp specificity. Where were you when you learned that the president had been shot? Practically everyone in my age group can and will answer that question with minute detail.
The first general elections in which I seriously interested myself were those of 1952 and 1956. These were heady days for the serious expansion of civil rights in the country—a topic, contrary to much official memory, of large and sympathetic engagement by many young southerners of all races. For many of us it was a time of serious mental maturation. Like many contemporaries I was a fervent partisan of Adlai Stevenson, who lost twice, and pretty decisively, to Eisenhower. But one now had the sense of freshness and possibility. By the summer of 1958, a little more than five years before he was murdered, Jack Kennedy had made his prominent appearance on the national scene and in a curious way even on my scene. It was hard for young people to stimulate much enthusiasm for Eisenhower, with or without the dubious assistance offered him by Richard Nixon. I graduated from college in 1958, and I spent most of that summer in Washington, thanks to a patronage job arranged out of the blue by Senator Fulbright, as I waited to sail to England to take up a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford. On a stifling late morning in July, when for forgotten reasons I was out on the streets sweating in a heavy suit, Senator Kennedy pulled up in his open convertible and stopped at a light approximately five yards away from where I was standing, also waiting, in the middle of Union Station Plaza near the Post Office. He was tanned, his hair coiffed but unconfined. Next to him on his big car’s big front bench-seat was an unknown beautiful young woman as perfectly turned out, radiant, and relaxed as the senator himself.
The Senator looked me in the eye and smiled charmingly directly at me. His right hand was draped casually over the top of the steering wheel, and he languidly raised its index finger in a gesture of minimalist eloquence that said “Not bad, huh, kid?”—meaning the convertible, the babe in the convertible, and doubtless the perfection of his current being and future prospects in general. Obviously, this man was going to be President. He knew it. I knew it. The babe knew it. Silently but unequivocally he shared the vital data-point with me curbside. Then the light changed; he nodded courteously; the young woman laughed; their car took off; I stood there dripping with sweat. My first president.
Five years later, lots of changes. He was President; but I myself wasn’t just chopped liver. I had earned three more academic degrees and completed a doctoral dissertation of intimidating erudition. I had found and married my life partner. We had a child on the way. I was a newly appointed Instructor in English at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and I was just at the moment puffing up a hill hurrying from one classroom to another amidst a large moving crowd with my friend and colleague Alan Dessen. I picked up on the chatter. Something about something bad happening to the President in Dallas. “Well,” said Alan. “This might be true. Kennedy really was going to be in Dallas.” “This will finish the Birchers!” said some hirsute graduate student from the human stream. Then he said it again, and yet again even louder. The reference was to members of the far-right group, the John Birch Society, who would now be discredited for having shot the President. Every cloud has its silver lining. It took us a while to get better information. John Kennedy would appear to have been shot by the only Communist in Texas; and very soon we heard he was dead.
Dealey Plaza. The Grassy Knoll. The man in the window. The Zapruder film. Jack Ruby. The New Orleans Cubans. Magic bullets. The Warren Commission. Everybody knows the story, yet we still don’t know the story and never will. In fact it becomes ever harder to believe there is a story at all. A flood of information and disinformation, police incompetence risen to new heights, the agony of evidentiary ambiguity and a hundred special agendas—all inexplicable, all funneling into mystery now canonized. The Kennedy assassination has become, year after year for sixty years, increasingly fugitive and ungraspable. Still, I would not have chosen the topic were it not for a serendipity. About ten days ago I got in the post a new volume of the Library of America: Don DeLillo: Three Novels of the 1980s. The Names, White Noise, and Libra. De Lillo is one of our truly brilliant experimental American novelists. Libra is his novel about Lee Harvey Oswald, who was a Libra, or perhaps I should say it is a fictitious treatment of Oswald and the Kennedy assassination which, while repeatedly stressing its fictionality and denying its historicity, is more illuminating than eight or ten other “straight” histories I have read. DeLillo is not merely a very fine writer; he is a formidable research scholar. There is probably less fiction in his fiction than in most history books. Certainly much better fiction.
But you cannot so much as approach this tar pit called the “Kennedy assassination” without being blackened with its very sticky goo, almost impossible to scrub clean. I discovered this when I was writing The Anti-Communist Manifestos and became lured into a side-track following the flamboyantly anti-Communist literary impresario Isaac Don Levine, a native Russian-speaker and plenipotentiary anti-communist hobgoblin who became guru to Marina Oswald as he had been guru to earlier generations of needy Soviet refugees and defectors. His Russian fluency, fairly rare in the America of the earlier twentieth century, gave him what was at the time an unusual advantage in Soviet matters, and he made the most of it. He is usually described as a journalist—which is not wrong, exactly, but hardly suggests the scope of his political influence on the anti-communist right. You may never have heard of this master co-opter of agendas, but he will surely one day receive the major biography he deserves.
DeLillo is a novelist, and novelists tell stories. Historical novelists tell historical stories. The “story” of Libra is a doozy, but in case you have not yet read it, as I had not, I shall say no more. The smallest homage I can pay to so brilliant a vision is to avoid ham-handed “spoilers”. What I will venture to say is that John Kennedy really did live, and he really did die from horrible gunshot wounds. Before that this very same man really did lift his index finger in silent but significant communication with me, me personally. How can it be that the nearest thing one can find to an explanation of the thing is a work of unapologetic fiction?
