By: Don DeLillo
Mysteries of Time & Space
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. They would separate the elements of each crowded second of time, trace the lonely history of the man in the sixth-floor window. There were people in white smocks to weigh the bullet fragments, to analyze the blurs on motion-picture film – a process known as “blur analysis.” A distinguished commission would be created. The investigators would collect exhibits, the staff would turn out a twenty-six-volume report. Events were reenacted with stopwatches.
One of the few lingering questions seemed to be whether people in other countries would agree with the commission’s findings that the assassination was the work of one man. Europeans and Middle Easterners are notoriously prone to believe in conspiracies. We were willing to grant them that quaint persuasion. They have a rich history, after all, of craft and deceit. Intricate maneuverings for advantage, cunning pursuits of power – these are Byzantine, they are Machiavellian.
Americans, for their own good reasons, tend to believe in lone gunmen. A stranger walks out of the shadows, a disaffected man, a drifter with three first names and an Oakie look about him, tight-lipped and squinting. We think we know exactly who he is.
What has become unraveled since that afternoon in Dallas is not the plot, of course, not the dense mass of characters and events, but the sense of a coherent reality most of us shared. We seem from that moment to have entered a world of randomness and ambiguity, a world totally modern in the way it shades into the century’s “emptiest” literature, the study of what is uncertain and unresolved in our lives, the literature of estrangement and silence. A European body of work, largely.
Powerful events breed their own network of inconsistencies. Loose ends, dead ends, small mysteries of time and space. Violence itself seems to cause a warp in the texture of things. There are jump cuts, blank spaces, an instant in which information leaps from one energy level to another. Dallas is a panorama of such things, a natural disaster in the heartland of the real, the comprehensible, the plausible. The lines that extend from that compressed event have shown such elaborate twists and convolutions that we are almost forced to question the basic suppositions we make about our world of light and shadow, solid objects and ordinary sounds, and to wonder further about our ability to measure such things, to determine weight, mass and direction, to see things as they are, recall them clearly, explain to waiting faces what happened.
The physical evidence contradicts itself, the eyewitness accounts do not begin to coincide. There are failures of memory, there are conflicting memories. We are not agreed on the number of gunmen, the number of shots, the origin of the shots, the time span between shots, the paths the bullets took, the number of wounds on the president’s body, the size and shape of the wounds, the amount of damage to the brain, the presence of metallic fragments in the chest, the number of caskets, the number of ambulances, the number of occipital bones (a fragment found in Dealey Plaza; an intact bone in the autopsy X-rays). On this side of the microscopes and cameras, bigger questions, complex manipulations. There are the intelligence links, the skeins of human relationships, the coincidences large and small, the right-wing theme, the left-wing theme, the Soviet and Cuban themes, the double-agent theme, the theme of renegade CIA men, the organized-crime theme, the theme of Oswald as an innocent dupe, the theme of Kennedy as the final victim of the Bay of Pigs – all these with their sets of supporting evidence, their bread-crumb trails through the labyrinth, some theories more elegant than others, of course, the best nearly breathtaking in their blend of documentation, rumor, paranoia, sex, politics, absurdity and terror.
Or is all this simply what happens when we expose the most ordinary life to relentless scrutiny, follow each friend, relative, acquaintance into his own roomful of shadows, keep following, keep connecting? We may all lead more interesting lives than we think.
One’s weary temptation is to say that the truth belongs to the realm of physics. One day in the twenty-first century, a professor of theoretical physics will present to us an entirely new picture of reality. Our world, he will explain at a sparsely attended press conference, is, in fact, sinking into the subatomic state. All of the paradoxes and illusions that scientists have found in the microsystems among electrons and other forms of quantum matter – the bizarre interactions, the sense of indeterminacy, the lack of cause and effect – these now constitute our daily bed and board. He will go on to say that such has been the case for some time; we have simply lacked a perspective from which to notice. It will be one of those shifts in global consciousness that only psychotics find bearable.
What do we do in the meantime? Do we lapse into mystical fatalism? Seven hundred millions Indians might suggest that this is the only mature response. No need, however. We are better educated now, after subsequent assassinations, cult murders, mass suicides. Dallas remains unique in its complexity and ambiguity in the sinister links, the doublings, the organized deceits, but we tend to see it now as simply the first in a chain of what we might call instances of higher violence – violence with its own liturgy of official grief, its own standards of newsworthiness, with its built-in set of public responses.
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 (by a man with three first names, as it turned out). By this time, the noise outside was general and piercing, but our view was to the south and we didn’t know whether there was smoke to be seen over Harlem. During the card game, as it continued amid talk of the event and the scattered dialogue of bets and raises, one of the men at the table, a gifted mimic, began to speak in a broad, deep, vibrant Negro voice. It seemed to slip out of him, almost catching him by surprise. He restricted his remarks to the game and the table. He didn’t try to say funny things, although he was a funny man, had always been, could make people double up when he was in form, as he often was. That night he stuck to routine remarks, delivering them in that Ebenezer Baptist voice, heavy and rich. The cards moved around the table. He began to tense up, he began to lose. Still the dramatic black voice rolled on. Somebody made a mild complaint – another loser – and the mimic desisted for a while. But soon he slipped back into it, automatically, calling the cards as he dealt them out, naming the bet, cuing the bettor. The sirens died somewhere to the north but the voice continued to pulse with curious emotion and after a while there was nothing any of us could do but try to stop noticing.
How strange it was to be an American.
The Secret Self
The operative myth of the Kennedy years was the romantic dream of Camelot. But there is a recurring theme or countermyth that may prove to be more enduring. It is the public’s belief in the secret manipulation of history. Documents lost, missing, altered, destroyed, classified. Deaths by suicide, murder, accident, unspecified natural causes. (Let’s assume that paranoia in some contexts is the only intelligent response.) The simplest facts elude authentication. People change their stories, change them again, make of vagueness and confusion and their own suicides a kind of perverse flirtation.
“Lee Harvey Oswald” often seems a secret design worked out by men who will never surface – a procedural diagram, a course in fabricated biography. Who put him together? He is not an actor so much as he is a character, a fictional character who first emerges as such in the year 1957, when he was stationed with a marine unit in Japan at Atsugi, a secret U-2 base where he watched American Bandstand, caught the clap and may have come into contact with Japanese or Russian agents.
Oswald seems scripted out of doctored photos, tourist cards, change-of-address cards, mail-order forms, visa applications, altered signatures, pseudonyms. His life as we’ve come to know it is a construction of doubles. In Mexico City, there may have been a second Oswald. Photographs exist of a broad-faced, stocky man outside the Russian embassy. The CIA identified the subject as Lee Harvey Oswald. No one has been able to explain the mistake.
There is the ex-marine (like Oswald) who defected to the Soviet Union (like Oswald) 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.
There were Oswald doubles in Austin, Irving and Dallas, Texas, in the days and weeks leading up to November 22nd – or 11/22, as we might refer to it here.
Even the Oswald paper work is an example of doubling. It is thought that the CIA maintained two Oswald files, one fabricated and harmless, one containing operational data showing a flesh-and-blood connection between Oswald and the agency.
A film shot a few minutes before the presidential limousine turned left onto Elm seems to show a fixture in each window of the double framework on the sixth floor of the School Book Depository. If there is a second figure, is he the Mexico City double, one of the Texas doubles or a man who represents a completely different kind of mechanism, a different area of tradecraft?
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 (and cherishing the knowledge, using it as nourishment, as a form of sustenance more vital than air, than water) that the FBI apparently can’t find ninety-two frames of the film in question.
A double in literature sometimes represents the hero’s secret self or primitive self. There is a “mysterious communication” between them, in Joseph Conrad’s phrase. Oswald can’t be the hero of a traditional tale, which means he must be the secret self. But then who is the hero? It would satisfy our sense of structural balance and of irony as well to give the answer that literature would seem to demand. Oswald is Jack Kennedy’s secret sharer.
But there may be another answer, more deeply fixed in the nature of identity, out of Poe instead of Conrad. A story begins: “Let me call myself, for the present, William Wilson. The fair page now lying before me need not be sullied with my real appellation.”
Oswald used the name Osborne more than once.
The CIA carried a 201 file under the name Lee Henry Oswald.
There was a man called Leon Oswald associated with a Cuban exile group in Dallas in September 1963.
A man who called himself Harvey Oswald tried to cash a check in a suburban Dallas supermarket in November 1963.
Oswald used the name O.H. Lee when he registered at a rooming house in Dallas. He also used H.O. Lee, Harvey Oswald Lee, Aliksei Oswald and Leslie Oswald.
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 policeman J.D. Tippit.
The name Hidell (A. Hidell, A.J. Hidell, Alek J. Hidell, Robert Hidell) takes on a life of its own. A man named Heindel (nicknamed Hidell) served with Oswald in the marines. The name appears on an index card found among Oswald’s effects, along with cards marked with the names of real people. The name was found in army intelligence files (cross-referenced Lee Harvey Oswald) – files that were destroyed in 1973.
The name also appears, a little less ambiguously, on membership cards and other documents found among Oswald’s papers.
In the end, citing names and name reversals and name variants, citing the possibility that he worked for one agency while appearing to work for another (whether he knew it or not, and that is the final modern touch), we are compelled to say that Oswald was his own double. Didn’t they dig up the body only recently to find out who was really buried there? This gives the paranoid one last thing to fear. His condition is now legally sanctioned, endorsed by judges who issue court orders for exhuming the dead.
It was Oswald in the ground, all right, acting even in death and decay as his own counterpart, his own secret self.
Movies and TV
The Kennedy assassination was a home 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. But in the end, the film has become our major emblem of uncertainty and chaos. The powerful moment of death, the surrounding blurs, patches and shadows.
The Reagan shooting was pure TV, a minicam improvisation. This fits the style of the would-be killer. If Oswald was put together by others, a secret pawn, then John Hinckley is a self-created media event. Hinckley lives in the stale air of the media. He is media-poisoned, a man drawn toward murder by a movie he saw, morbidly attracted to an actress he had never met. They are familiar now, men who choose victims based on their current popularity and accessibility. There is an element of the performing self in such acts of violence. Hinckley sees the act on television even as he commits it. (As do, conceivably, the Secret Service men, judging by a certain choreography of gesture that day in Washington, a self-conscious flourish of cocked weapons, as though the documentary history of the shooting was already running through the minds of one or two men on the scene.)
This is a self-referring event. The man who performs the act comments on it at the same time. He knows in advance what our reaction will be. This knowledge and this reaction mysteriously find their way into the act itself. Hinckley makes us feel a particular disgust because he has brought our perceptions and interpretations into his moment of violence. His own sense of the crime is based on what he knows the world will say about it. It is a
secondhand act, derivative, borrowed, used.
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 Life, we find a double-page layout of more than thirty film frames documenting the Reagan shooting, with captions and a small block of print. In the copy we learn that the photographer had been present at other attempts on public figures, that he knew about gunmen walking out of crowds, that he approached the president’s limousine from the street to get a good vantage point – and that, happily, his “prescience and experience paid off.” A photo opportunity. As Hinckley started shooting, the photographer “shot back.” The acts are made to sound like similar responses to an overstimulating environment. The strips of film show sprawled bodies, crouched and bleeding men. Are we meant to congratulate them for being part of the photographic payoff?
Hinckley seems to be in almost constant touch with the media. His communications with the more respectable journals have a hopeful and touching quality, like a novice writer sending stories to The New Yorker. But he properly belongs to the supermarket cult of modern folklore and dread, those tabloids on spindly racks at the checkout counter, near the breath mints and nasal inhalers. UFOs, cancer, psychics predicting world war, voices from the grave. On the tabloid scale of morbid celebrity, Hinckley ranks well below such icons of the grotesque as Son of Sam and the Reverend Jim Jones. But he is a special case, not so much a subject of interest for tabloid fantasists as he is a fellow reader who one day walked through the page into nowhere land, carried on twenty milligrams of Valium.
The Killer Prepares
One of advertising’s unspoken roles is to absorb social disruptions and dangers into the molded jell of mass-brand production. This is the philosophy of total consumerism. Black rage becomes the tacit subject of commercials for Lite beer. The ex-athletes who appear in such commercials, large black men tutored in snarls, intense stares, various intimidating gestures and expressions, serve the consumer culture by debasing righteous anger. They allow it to be incorporated into the living-room world of sitcoms and game shows. The mean looks and gestures they are asked to supply in a given commercial’s scenario are ways by which the culture softens the texture of real danger, changes real things to fantasies, undercuts meaning and purpose. We consume social threats and problems as if they were breakfast food.
Consumerism is a form of mass anesthesia. It has its own artificial and dulling language, its four-color mosaic of images and patterns. It causes unfulfilled desires to rise above the rooftops. It makes people lonely.
Madison Avenue hasn’t found an acceptable commercial format for assassins. But in the lonely pockets of towns and cities, a thousand minds tick. Stalking a victim can be a way of organizing one’s loneliness, making a network out of it, a fabric of connections. Desperate men give their solitude a purpose and a destiny.
“Man spies on himself,” said Octavio Par.
Self-aware men, men alert to their own failed instincts. Self-watchers, dwellers in random space. If the world is where we hide from ourselves, what do we do when the world is no longer accessible? We devise mental formulas, intricate systems of ritual, repetition, inward spying. We invent false names, invent a destiny, purchase a firearm.
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. His suicide attempt in Russia seems distant to us in more ways than one. Not necessarily halfhearted – just vague, formless, casual, obscure. (“Somewhere a violin plays, as I watch my life whirl away.”) His movements through the world of espionage seem the gropings of a lifelong drifter, someone not sure what the connections are and who is making them.
A life in small rooms. A pattern of withdrawal and extended disappearance. A suicide attempt, a period in the brig. At times, his career has the familiar feel of those lives of dedicated and obsessed men who undergo long periods of isolation, either enforced or voluntary, who live close to death for the dake of some powerful ideal or evil, and who eventually emerge as great leaders or influential thinkers, outsized figures in the history of revolution and war.
In America, not crowds and power but the man in a small room, the solitary who dreams of killing the charismatic leader. There is nothing outsized about Oswald, Bremer, Hinckley, Ray and the others. It is the victim who suggests a certain dimension and breadth – the victim in the hotel, the motel, the shopping mall.
Martin Luther King, George Wallace, Malcolm X., both Kennedy’s caused excitations in the body politic, deep sweats of fear and desire in the media. A George Wallace speech on the radio – in the atmosphere of civil rights, Vietnam, police attacks on demonstrators – was the sound of a McLuhan tribal drum. There was a primitive fury emerging from the little lighted box, a compressed and implosive power. The voice had found its medium, a place of rousing heat and passion. It was only a matter of time.
Ronald Reagan, circling his own presidency like a lost satellite, is not a figure to compel the odd gun-wielder out of his room. That he was nearly killed only testifies to the suspension of formulas and rules, to the power of publicity and the random streams of disaffection running through the land.
The killer prepares by wandering in empty spaces, watching television, reading books about previous killers. He gets himself photographed, writes letters or diary entries, goes back to his hotel, as Arthur Bremer did, to put on a better set of clothes in which to commit the act, for the sake of his self-image.
The Multinational Man
Was Oswald a low-level American agent who was turned by the KGB? Was it the other way around?
Agents seem eager to be turned. In fact, nearly everyone does – technicians, diplomats, military attachés, 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.
Hardware, software. Perhaps there is a relationship between the advanced state of the hardware and the general decline in such values as loyalty and patriotic commitment. Sophisticated devices cause people to lose conviction. We are more easily shaped, swayed, influenced.
Espionage is well known to be a game, a maze, a set of mirrors. It is also big business, and this is a reason for people to sell secrets in the routine manner of a dealer moving Turkish rugs. Former members of the CIA seem happily occupied shipping explosives to Libya, torture devices to Uganda, military equipment to the Soviet Union. They don’t call it the Company for nothing.
Multinational companies have claimed the loyalties that nations have lost. BEcause they set up unprecedented levels of benefit, incentive and privilege for executives, especially abroad, and because they pursue markets with undiminished élan, multinationals can make demands and request sacrifices that no government would even begin to consider except possibly in a time of war.
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. He marries and divorces moneyed Americans, goes into the oil business, works for the U.S. government in Yugoslavia, does undercover work for a Swedish syndicate in Africa. He disappears for a year, turns up in Guatemala, where the Bay of PIgs is being orchestrated and rehearsed.
The multinational man. Divided loyalties, political expedience, secret financing. George and Lee and Marina speak Russian to one another. George tries to find work for Lee, make living arrangements for Marina. AFter the assassination, he enters history – a continuing subject of interest for investigators, theorists, special agents and select committees. Finally, in 1977, suicide in Palm Beach with a twenty-gauge shotgun.
A print of the famous backyard photo of Oswald holding a rifle and some radical journals carries on its reverse side the inscription: To my friend George from Lee Oswald. There is the legend, in Russian, in an unidentified hand: Hunter of Fascists – ha-ha-ha. There is, finally, bottom right, the notation: Copyright G. de M.
Establish your right to the mystery; document it; protect it.
Documents
1. Appointment in Dallas: The Final Solution to the Assassination of JFK. A Zebra paperback. The Hugh McDonald Publishing Corp. Hugh McDonald, a law-enforcement expert and former head of security for Barry Goldwater, tracks the real killer to the Westbury Hotel in London. They sat in a couple of overstuffed chairs in the lobby. The killer, called Saul for obscure reasons, sells McDonald that he was hired by a private group for $50,000. He says that he went to Dallas, got a hotel room, mused on the ways of the world. “I was going to kill the president of the United States, and I felt completely relaxed. I chose a corner table in the hotel restaurant and ate a good dinner.”
McDonald, the probing cop, asks: “Cocktail? Wine?”
“Just one vodka and tonic,” he is told.
The next morning Saul walked to Dealey Plaza with his loaded rifle, plus scope, strapped to his upper body under the right armpit, the barrel extending into the right trouser leg. He wore baggy pants.
He shot the president from the second floor of the County Records Building but failed to kill the decoy Oswald in a covering hail of Secret Service fire because the Secret Service never fired. He put the rifle back into his pants, hobbled out of the building and in two hours was out of the country.
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.
2. Manuscript Found in Bremer’s Vehicle.
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. Bremer is like the sidekick in Bonnie and Clyde played by Michael J. Pollard. A boy broadly gesturing his way through a half-farcical story defined by guns and violence.
Following Richard Nixon to Ottawa, he believes he has been photographed by the police. “Later I thought it would of been cute to do a Charlie Chaplin walk & twist my hat around my index finger & lift up a leg & spin around for the great movie maker.”
Today few people recall Bremer’s name, as few will recall Hinckley’s in the years to come. The name suggests a near nonentity – initials A.B., employment spotty, no fixed address. But Bremer’s diary holds considerably more human feeling and scornful, penetrating insight than we would expect to find in any current work on political violence, world affairs, etc. (“Mr. Nixon only comments on his own books,” say the aides and retainers every time the chief is accused in print.) Bremer gets lost searching for motels he can afford, gets lost searching for towns and cities, mistakes one city for another, eats fatty foods, pops aspirin, forgets to take his guns when he leaves a plane, accidentally fires a gun in his motel room, loses his Browning automatic down a crevice in his own car.
“Irony abounds,” he says.
He travels around “like a hobo or some kind of comical character.” Taking wrong turns, lost in endless suburbs, he is almost nostalgic about an episode in a New York massage parlor. “Nothing has happened for so long, 3 months, the 1st person I held conversation with in 3 months was a near-naked girl rubbing my erect penis & she wouldn’t let me put it thru her.”
He goes to see A Clockwork Orange and decides to switch from Nixon to George Wallace. Inspired by one movie, Bremer would eventually provide inspiration for the main character in another, Taxi Driver. This second movie, in turn, would help inspire Hinckley to attempt to murder Ronald Reagan.
“I tried to fuck Lady-Luck
But she locked her knees
And wouldn’t please ....”
Bremer seems to feel that he and Wallace deserve each other. A couple of mediocrities. “The editors will say – ‘Wallace dead? Who cares.’ He won’t get more than 3 minutes on network T.V. news.”
For a twenty-one-year-old, Bremer is remarkably well versed in the modern arts of irony, self-conscious alienation, wry expressions of failure and collapsed ego. We see him working up to something grim, sly, horrible.
“Headache. 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.
“My cry upon firing will be, ‘A penny for your thoughts.’”
3. Hearings before the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy.
This is the official title given to the twenty-six accompanying volumes of that time capsule of Western wisdom commonly called the Warren Report. Everything is here. Baptismal records, report cards, divorce petitions, affidavits, canceled checks, IRS forms, job applications, daily time sheets, letters, envelopes, post cards (both sides), receipts, chronologies, floor plans, aerial photos, acres of FBI reports, thousands of pages of testimony. We see telegrams sent to Jack Ruby after he shot Oswald. “Well done.” “Congratulations.” “Good for you.” We see Jack Ruby’s mother’s dental chart, dated January 1938. “Remar[---] patient states that she has teeth but not wearing them.” We see Marina Oswald’s pharmacy diploma and her daughter June’s vaccination certificate – Minsk City Health Department. We find a half page designated “Diagram of a Hair.” Sure enough, there is a sketch of a strand of hair labeled “root,” “shaft” and “tip.” We find sketches of animal hair and human hair. There is a section concerned with the racial determination of hair (Caucasian, Negroid, Mongoloid), with sketched samples of each. “Unlike fingerprints,” we read, “hairs are not unique.” We are in the grip of someone’s obsessive-compulsive hair syndrome, and we begin to feel an eerie fascination. There is a diagram of a strand of hair seen longitudinally and in cross section. There is a discussion of the various colors, shapes and textures of human hair. Finally, brilliantly fulfilling, in volume seventeen, exhibit 672, there it is, almost illegibly labeled, a microphotograph of three of Lee Harvey Oswald’s pubic hairs. True. And in the second of two panels, there is a match between a pubic hair sample taken from a blanket and a similar sample taken from Oswald himself after his arrest. Amazing that in the short time they had him in their keeping, someone would think to pluck a hair or two from the perpetrator’s crotch. Elsewhere (everything in the Warren Report is elsewhere), we are advised that Oswald’s pubic hairs are smooth, not knobby. “The tips of the hairs were sharp, which is unusual for pubic hairs; the cuticle was very thin for pubic hairs; the scales displayed only a very small protrusion; the pigmentation was very fine, equally dispersed and occasionally chained together, and displayed only very slight gapping; cortical fusi were for the most part absent; the medulla was either fairly continuous or completely absent; and the root area was rather clear of pigment, and contained only a fair amount of cortical fusi, which was unusual.”
To say the least. The unnamed master who composed these lines reminds us that we are in the realm of literature, in one of those obsessively encyclopedic novels that bore inward toward some central truth, which is all the more eternal for its utter inconsequence. This is the novel in which nothing is left out. There are lists of things, people, places, memories, every detail of waking and sleeping awareness, an incredible haul of human muttering. If a handful of writers have given us whole museums of modern consciousness, then the Warren Report has provided a ruined city of trivia. Detailed descriptions of pubic-hair strands. Visas, memos, transcripts, tear sheets, change-of-address cards, ledger sheets, embassy files, insurance claims, property lists, postoperative X-rays, Jack Ruby’s 1956 tax return, Governor Connally’s necktie, photographs of fences, tire imprints, pieces of knotted string – the massed debris of a surprisingly small number of lives.
We try not to interpret these meditations on pubic hair as someone's idea of comic gusto. It is not audacity and cunning we want from the Warren Report. The assassination provided sufficient measures of both. We want to believe the hair belongs there. It is no less important than key eyewitness testimony, solid evidence linking a man to a gun, a man to another man. There is a forlorn truth in those strands of hair. To believe that the hair is less meaningful than other exhibits in the twenty-six volumes is to pretend we can learn the answers to important questions about the death of the president.
When experience is powerless, all things are the same.
Shifting Perceptions
There used to be a metaphysician listed in the Manhattan Yellow Pages. But he lived in Queens.
Questions of ultimate reality are often tricky, sometimes lost sight of, as we follow the natural tendency to build concepts, patterns, and theories. Every small detail and circumstance in the Dallas labyrinth is not only open to multiple interpretation but seems to invite elaborate embellishment. It is as though we have been examining the career of a renowned and exceptionally deep-textured writer. Every aspect of his life and work has its own team of assistant professors of English to pan for minutiae and assorted micron droppings, to work up new explications and directions, devise shifts in emphasis. The assassination has its Oswald-in-New-Orleans experts, its Jack-Ruby-at-Parkland-Hospital experts, its interpreters of the ballistic evidence and the acoustical evidence, its own orthodoxy, revisionism and fantasy life. There is hardly an area or relationship that hasn’t been exhaustively investigated, some links established and confirmed, others imagined, wondered at, dreamed upon. Necessary work, canny, brave, often brilliant. But also subject, as literary reputations are, to deep shifts in the public consciousness. In 1964, according to a poll, roughly seventy percent of the American people thought Oswald had acted alone. At the end of the 1970s, another poll showed that eighty percent believed in conspiracy. We have been educated in skepticism, Europeanized, by reports of official mistakes, half-hearted investigations, willful omissions. The valuable work of the theorists has shown us the dark possibilities, prodded us to admit to ourselves the difficult truths of the matter. No simple solution, no respite from mystery and chronic suspicion. Conspiracy is now the true faith.
This means it is almost time for another shift.
If, twenty years ago, it was the most clear-thinking and farseeing among us who insisted on conspiracy, we are probably nearing the time when the shrewdest, the most rational analysts will begin to build a case for Oswald as the lone assassin – an Oswald different from the man in the Warren Report but a lone gunman nonetheless, a man with links to intelligence agencies but not necessarily guided by them, not duped by them, a man more childlike and lost than most theorists will today concede. A new era will begin, a new industry will open up – new riches, although a narrower vein. Give good minds an opening and they will create a conceptual masterwork, a gleaming four-faced idol much more beautiful, fearful and intriguing than the facts as we know them could conceivably yield.
This is the point. We will be launched once more on a search for connective patterns. We will build burial mounds, craft new objects, infer the existence of black holes from evidence we find elsewhere in the galaxy. The ultimate truth – what really happened – will probably continue to elude us, but the metaphysician may not even notice. We will find our temporary truth, as always, in the persuasive stuff of our own perceptions.
The assassination, in the end, is a story about our uncertain grip on the world – a story exploded into life by a homeless man who himself could not grip things tightly and hold them fast, whose soul-scarred loneliness and rage led him to invent an American moment that echoes down the decades.
American Blood
On November 25th, amid bandsmen in scarlet tunics, pipers in bearskin and kilts, the flag-draped coffin bearing the body of Jack Kennedy was carried on a gun carriage through the streets of Washington, drawn by a team of matched grays. A riderless horse followed, a pair of boots turned backwards in the stirrups. Bells tolled, choirs sang. The heads of state walked twelve abreast, the cardinal stood before an altar, chanting in Latin, as traffic was stopped, trains delayed, flags flown at half-mast across the world, as ship captains cast wreaths into the sea. At the cemetery, fifes and drums, salutes and volleys and taps. The F-105s flew over, followed by Air Force One, at an altitude of 500 feet, dipping its wings as the coffin was placed over the grave.
A little over a year later, the body of Malcolm Little – Red, Homeboy, Malcolm X, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz – rested in a bronze casket poised above an open grave in a cemetery some miles north of New York. The body, prepared by a Sudanese sheik, was scented in holy oil and wrapped in seven white shrouds. The Moselsms in the crowd knelt in prayer with their bodies extended forward, foreheads to the earth. A second sheik, in a brown robe and black-banded white turban, recited prayers over the body. When the coffin was in the ground, mourners began to take handfuls of dirt and drop them into the opening, keeping the grave workers away, white men with shovels. The coffin faced east, as is the custom, toward Mecca.
The country that produced both men and their violent deaths now had its symbolism of deep division, to be intensified and darkened as time passed. In the beauty and precision of burial rites, we try to redress the terror of last moments – and perhaps, beyond that, to strike a balance to the disorder of living itself. Some impossible law of perfection is obeyed. The bloodspray and chaos in Dealey plaza and at the Audubon Ballroom are brought to a sameness and a stillness that make us want to find a consoling harmony somewhere out there in the vast strange vapor we call the nation. Red shined shoes in a dance hall in Boston when Jack was a student at Harvard. Beyond this, and a scathing statement Malcom made when Kennedy was shot, we don’t know where to look for a connection not made in a moment of sudden blood.
[end of transcription. final word count: 6517]
References and Notes
MLA
DeLillo, Don. “American Blood: A Journey Through the Labyrinth of Dallas and JFK.” 1983, December. Rolling Stone. pp. 21-28, 74.
APA
DeLillo, D. (1983). American blood: A journey through the labyrinth of Dallas and JFK. Rolling Stone, Dec. ‘83, 21-28 & 74.
Transcriber’s Note
In the last semester of my MA program, I took an American literature course featuring DeLillo’s Libra. Beyond the content, I was fascinated by (what I see as) the major feat of the novel: a total reconfiguration of the image of Oswald. I started thinking about the consequences of Oswald’s public persona as fortified by the media, and how the paper trail of a relatively unremarkable life (that culminated in the “original postmodern event”) which has been told and retold and revisited, documented and contradicted, explained and speculated upon and ultimately imagined, can still (and will always) elude concretization. There’s something so powerful about the persistence of Oswald’s anonymity despite his being a household name.
Anyways, I wrote a term paper about the construction of Oswald’s public identity. I had seen bits of this article quoted and the whole thing referenced in most of the supporting research I read, but couldn't find a readable copy of the article. It wasn’t available in the Stone’s digital archive, and my college’s library didn’t have a copy – or so I thought. When I requested the article via interlibrary loan (a wonderful service!!), the librarian denied my request, stating that we actually did have a copy – stored on microfilm slides in the basement. After a while locating the film, and some awkward moments becoming acquainted with the microfilm projector, and some even more strenuous work scrolling manually through 80 pages of ads and articles and full-page images (did I mention I put the film in upside down, so everything was backwards?), I was able to isolate and save the blocks of text that comprise the article. And once I had 6 printed pages with grainy text as wide as a grain of rice, I knew I’d want to go through with the service of transcribing it and making it accessible to others with the same (seemingly inherently American) curiosity with Kennedy’s alleged assassin and the “whirl of time, the true life inside him” (Libra, 46).
I hope you enjoy it.
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