Alek James Hidell, Francis Gary Powers, James Earl Ray, O.H. Lee, William Bobo, John F. Kennedy, Mark David Chapman, Martin Luther King, John Wilkes Boothe, D.F. Drittal.
Lee Harvey Oswald.
There is something in a name, sometimes. There is some ominous ring, some vestige of history clinging to it, being absorbed, the name growing and growing. There are names and there are names and then there are strong names. Flowing, solid, idiosyncratic, rolling right off the tongue names, names with their own hopes and desires, names trying hard to drive home the idea of nominative determinism, names seeking a place in the graveyard of lapidary history.
It occurred to Oswald that everyone called the prisoner by his full name. The Soviet press, local TV, the BBC, the Voice of America, the interrogators, etc. Once you did something notorious, they tagged you with an extra name, a middle name that was ordinarily never used. You were officially marked, a chapter in the imagination of the state. Francis Gary Powers. In just these few days the name had taken on a resonance, a sense of fateful event. It already sounded historic.
In Libra, his 1988 novel revolving around the double-punch of the JFK assassination and the concurrent shooting of the prime suspect, Lee Harvey Oswald, writer Don DeLillo plays a home game. It is the one thing that has defined his career as a writer, 
he noted in an interview, the seminal moment in shaping American history right up until that other seminal event; from 11/22 to 9/11, from one double-punch to another.
The obsessive replay of Jack Ruby gunning down LHO, the Zapruder film, the endless tossing and turning and discussing and whirling around, the weighing of facts; these are stock subjects for DeLillo. It was an event, capital E. It was no longer about two men dying and two men brandishing a gun, it was about abbreviations, about JFK and LHO and CE-399, numbers adding up and not adding up, coincidences, patterns.
Men in small rooms
DeLillo follows the many threads of what I would call the side cast, suspect names hovering around the case. One of the characters is the fictional Nicholas Branch, a CIA archivist who, years after the fact, has been burdened with the responsibility of the archive, with making a report out of the totality of data on the case, data which accumulates faster than he can analyze it. Here is another seminal role of the JFK shooting: a foreshadowing of the Information Age. Someone happened to catch the tragic act on tape and the whole nation watched the consequent murder of the suspect live on television. The case is infinite, all the data combinable in endless variations and interpretations. Branch, in a specially built room adjacent to his house, paper stacked up high, could very well be DeLillo himself, overwhelmed by all the possibilities, determined to pull a narrative from the rubble.
Nicholas Branch has unpublished state documents, polygraph reports, Dictabelt recordings from the police radio net on November 22. He has photo enhancements, floor plans, home movies, biographies, bibliographies, letters, rumors, mirages, dreams. This is the room of dreams, 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.
There that is: men in small rooms. It could have been spelled in capitals, it could have easily been the name of the novel. This seems to be the essence of all the men (they are all men) who are somehow involved in the assassination plot that DeLillo has cobbled together: Win Everett, T.J. Mackey, David Ferrie, Guy Banister, Lawrence Permanter. Some real, some fictional. Men in small rooms. It calls to mind Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov sweating and steaming in his small garret “like a spider”, caught in his own web, his mind running and running and running, slowly driving himself insane. “Low ceilings and tiny rooms cramp the soul and the mind,” Raskolnikov concludes. Meanwhile, Nicholas Branch sits in his small room analyzing the facts that are not facts and wonders: “Can a photograph be lonely?” Lonely men in small rooms. Lonely important men in small rooms. Their story is, as Adam Curtis says on the subject of spies, "not the story of men and women who have a better and deeper understanding of the world than we do. In fact in many cases it is the story of weirdos who have created a completely mad version of the world that they then impose on the rest of us."
They are men stuck in the past, stuck in grievance and bitterness. Grieved by the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, they have a persistent tendency to skip over this unfortunate affair and bask in the glory of their earlier triumphs, Central American invasions of the 30s and 40s, Cuba, Nicaragua, Guatemala. You slip into the feeling that these countries only exist for the benefit of these men, for the benefit of their nostalgia, empty denominators to hang their stubborn egos on.
The internal logic of plots
Any story or narrative of which the ending is set in stone (or perhaps set in blood) gathers an extra dimension, and DeLillo makes good use of this, dithering and backtracking all the time, running around his subject in wider and wider circles while you, the reader, wait for him to get to the gruesome conclusion, get to the fucking point. Similar to watching a movie like Titanic, or The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, the ending bleeds into the beginning. For maximum effect, it is best to commence far away, start when Robert Ford is a shy kid, as far removed from a killer as can be, start when Lee Oswald is just a boy raised by a single mum, heckled and bullied, a child like so many others in America. With the end in mind, there is only one direction this kid, still innocent, can go. From the start up, it is set up to be exactly like the incessant instant replays that DeLillo so often remarks upon, the fascination in knowing it will always end the same and the horror found, time and time again, in the confirmation of this law. A car crash unfolding across the slow-motion time span of 450 pages. “All plots move deathward,” DeLillo notes, an idea he had already showcased in White Noise and here returns to.
Plots carry their own logic. There is a tendency of plots to move toward death. He believed that the idea of death is woven into the nature of every plot. A narrative plot no less than a conspiracy of armed men. The tighter the plot of a story, the more likely it will come to death. A plot in fiction, he believed, is the way we localize the force of the death outside the book, play it off, contain it.
Now of course, the subject has been exhausted, the events of November the 22nd, 1963, have been rehashed endlessly by novelists, sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, pedagogues, educationalists, historians, assassination experts, presidential experts, Cuba experts, Soviet Union experts, America experts, Dallas experts, JFK experts, Oswald experts; this is not DeLillo's shtick. He is not a conspiracist. He draws up the blueprint of a conspiracy, the faintest of plots, and then mocks it while it unravels and falls apart. In fact, he is arguing for the exact opposite, that the plot has its own logic, that history cannot be engineered.
If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It’s the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act.
But maybe not. Nicholas Branch thinks he knows better. He has learned enough about the days and months preceding November 22, and enough about the twenty-second itself, to reach a determination that the conspiracy against the president was a rambling affair that succeeded in the short term due mainly to chance. Deft men and fools, ambivalence and fixed will and what the weather was like.
This is where the title comes in. Not Men in Small Rooms, like I suggested above, but Libra. The sign. Scales. Weight. David Ferrie tries to convince Oswald of the deathwardness of his own particular plot, that his being a Libra “seems to tell them everything they had to know.” He explains Oswald's behavior, his shifting allegiance between Russian and American causes, between opposite ideologies, as the typical behavior of a Libran, and claims that it is just a matter of tipping the scales either way, of something, somehow, weighing in.
Weighing in. The weight of history. Men in small rooms. Librans. This is what it comes down to. Men like Jack Ruby, haunted and driven by “the shock of what it means to be nothing, to know you are nothing, to be fed the message of your nothingness every day for all your days, down and down the years”. Men wanting to insert themselves into history, men like Lee Harvey Oswald.
He feels he is living at the center of an emptiness. He wants to sense a structure that includes him, a definition clear enough to specify where he belongs. But the system floats right through him, through everything, even the revolution. He is a zero in the system.
Yoni Wolf, singer of the American band Why?, seems to understand. In his Song of the Sad Assassin, he is at a murder scene, but he is simultaneously alone, putting coins into a washing machine. He “feels like the last eight frames of film before a slow motion Lee Harvey Oswald gets shot in the gut and killed.” This is not to say he feels like Oswald. No, he feels stuck in a void, stuck in incessant replay, stuck in a plot that was always turning deathward, stuck in one of the most famous pieces of moving picture ever put to tape, hurtling to a fate even more inevitable than that of all those other figures on other tapes of film; that is, more inevitable than inevitable. He is Lee Oswald realizing the inevitability of turning into Lee Harvey Oswald, a name, a myth.
In the end, Oswald is buried in alienation, loneliness, emptiness, despite everything, under an alias, William Bobo, the last of the many he employed. This happens in Fort Worth, watched over solely by his brother, wife, little girls and mother. The last words in the novel are for this mother, who over the course of the narrative turns into the mother of a myth, not a flesh-and-blood mother, a mother determined to get the story right. Out of love for her son, she claims, but it doesn't really come across as love. It is the same struggle for a sense of structure that occupies everyone else involved. She is ultimately left, not with a son, but merely with a name.
No matter what happened, how hard they schemed against her, this was the one thing they could not take away - the true and lasting power of his name. It belonged to her now, and to history.
