Libra - Don Delillo [1]
There is a video game you can play in which you assume the position and vantage point of Lee Harvey Oswald looking out on Dealey Plaza as the presidential motorcade rolls by. The game was released on the forty-first anniversary of the assassination by a company based in Scotland. It challenges you to recreate the three shots fired at the president’s car from the sixth-floor window of the book warehouse where Oswald worked. If you can do this more accurately than anyone else, in terms of trajectory and timing, you can win one hundred thousand dollars. Shoot the first lady by mistake and see points deducted from your score.
There is a T-shirt you can wear that bears the photographic image of Oswald, mortally wounded by Jack Ruby, eyes shut, mouth twisted open, an icon of man in pain, except that the pain in this case is pure rock ’n’ roll. Ruby is brandishing a guitar, not a revolver, and the detective at the other end of the frame, in his pale suit and matching Stetson, is strapped into a guitar as well, and there at center stage is the mythic figure of Oswald, barking his sad and ragged love into a hand mike.
-2-
Through the years many themes have developed around the assassination of President Kennedy. They involve plot twists, complex motives, nitwit theories, foreign countries, domestic intelligence agencies, criminal organizations, law-enforcement bureaus and a sense of the secret manipulation of history.
Is there something else poised at the edge of revelation, some hard clear provable reality, one that points either to Oswald as the lone gunman or to the presence of a second shooter in DealeyPlaza that day, as the motorcade moved down Elm Street?
This question suggests the final theme, which is modem technology.
Technology tends to represent a thrust toward the future, an accelerated promise of microrefined systems and networks, deeper probes into the way we live and think. Technology claims the future on our behalf. It also has the capacity to reclaim the past—specifically, in this case, a single elusive moment trapped in the grooves of an old dictaphone belt.
There have been decades of photoanalysis, ballistics tests and other forms of forensic investigation. There is today, in the works, a digital scanning apparatus that may finally answer a central question still hovering over the blood-spattered limousine. This device will map the sounds recorded, accidentally, through an open microphone on a police motorcycle, supposedly when the shots were fired. These sounds were transmitted, instantaneously, to a control room at Dallas police headquarters, where all radio traffic was routinely recorded.
This is the only known audio recording made in those crucial moments. Years went by before the tape was discovered and then analyzed by acoustics experts. Two investigations yielded conflicting results. But these findings were issued in 1979 and 1982. There are new technologies now, higher expectations. When the scanning apparatus is operational, scientists believe they will be able to render a clear digital image of the sounds captured on the old recording. They will isolate the gunshots from extraneous noise and remote voices. Then, perhaps, there will be an answer. Three gunshots, Oswald acted alone. Four gunshots, there was another shooter.
In Libra there he is, the second shooter, a man with a name, a face and a nationality. This is how lost history becomes the free weave of fiction. He stands behind the stockade fence on the grassy knoll, weapon in hand, watching the limousine approach. He is not the answer to the question that investigators, scientists, historians, government officials and countless others have been asking through the decades. He is simply the man