Tipping the Scales

David Ferrie really believes in astrology. This comes up quite a bit in his interactions with Lee, as he repeatedly brings up the fact that Lee was born under the sign of Libra. Libra is the sign of the scales, of balance, and so, astrologically, this means that Lee's life hinges on balance, ready to be tipped either way by the slightest outside influence.

I probably would have thought little of all of this were it not for the fact that the title of the book is, of course, Libra. This fact made me of think of the unstable Libran scales in the context of the novel as a whole, and specifically of the plot to assassinate Kennedy. What Mackey, Raymo, Elko et al. are trying to pull off is not an easy stunt. They are trying to kill the president of the United States in broad daylight in front of hundreds of onlookers (one of whom is armed with a video camera, even though they don't know it) without anyone knowing that it was them. Any minor hitch in their plan could screw up everything, either by preventing Kennedy's death or by revealing them as the culprits (or, worse, both), and so it is vital that they maintain that metaphorical balance. Really, killing Kennedy is the easy part of the plan - they are, after all, high-ranking government officials with lots of resources at their hands. The hard part is getting away with it. They need to find someone to help them by firing off a few shots from another direction so that they can blame him in a way that's convincing enough such that people won't strongly suspect that there's more to the story until it's too late to convict the true conspirators.

And the person that they find to do that job is Lee Harvey Oswald, a Libran himself. Unfortunately for Mackey, Raymo, Elko et al., Oswald is not a very trustworthy person, and the conspirators must tip his psychological scales to get him to cooperate with them (which is where Ferrie comes in). In a rather beautiful twist, the vast resources of the CIA are useless to them here. They have to convince Oswald to cooperate with them; a task that can only be achieved through interpersonal skills - an area unsuited to the expertise of the stereotypically cold, unfeeling, all-business CIA operatives.

Was Ruby In On the Conspiracy?

With so much of the novel leading up to Oswald's fateful shooting of Kennedy, it's easy to overlook the subsequent shooting of Oswald himself by Jack Ruby. In real life, the question of what, if any, conspiracy existed to assassinate the president must also cover Ruby's shooting of Oswald. Many have pointed to Ruby's ties to mob activity as evidence that Ruby was approached by mob members and told to kill Oswald to keep him from talking. DeLillo's portrayal of Oswald as someone who was, in a way, tricked into participating in the assassination supports this. We read Oswald's thoughts as he exits the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository - he plans to tell the truth to the authorities, to reveal that he was set up and that he didn't actually kill the president. This would be a perfect opportunity for DeLillo to portray Ruby as in on the plot. But he doesn't. He simply has Ruby absolutely sickened by the president's death and in utter hatred of Oswald. After a brief talk with his friend Jack Karlinsky, he decides to shoot Oswald. No conspiracy there.

Or is there? After all, it's Karlinsky who suggests that Ruby kill Oswald, and the same conversation between the two Jacks reveals that Karlinsky had been discussing the situation with Carmine Latta, who, as we have already seen, is a shady figure with mob ties and a deep hatred of Kennedy. Just the kind of person who would have helped orchestrate the president's assassination and just the kind of person who would want Oswald dead to keep him from talking.

DeLillo does, then, seem to strongly imply that the idea for Ruby to kill Oswald originated with, or at least went through, Carmine Latta, but he doesn't definitively answer this part of the mystery the same way that he does the shooting of Kennedy. Why does DeLillo leave this question open? Is it because he wants the novel to focus on the Kennedy assassination itself? Is it because the structure of the novel keeps him from adequately answering the question? Whatever the reason, DeLillo provides an interesting conclusion to the plot - after going into extreme detail in his explanation of the shooting of Kennedy, he fails to even definitively answer who was in on the shooting of Oswald.

McKennledy (or: All U.S. Presidents of Irish Descent Get Assassinated)

Seeing as how our current novel is all about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, I've been looking for a good opportunity to write a blog post about what I find to be the most fascinating event in all of 1901 (probably even the entire 191st decade, although extending that to the entire 20th century might be a bit of a stretch): the assassination of President William McKinley. Unfortunately, I've struggled to draw parallels between the two events. They're really very different. Kennedy was shot from a very large distance, whereas McKinley was shot while touching his assassin (or at least while within a few millimeters of him). Kennedy's assassination might be the most disputed event ever; McKinley's assassination was about as cut and dried as it gets (his assassin, Leon Czologsz, was executed just 53 days after shooting McKinley). So I thought that I might be able to craft a blog post about how different the two assassinations were, but then I came across a pretty noteworthy similarity: Neither Czolgosz nor Lee Harvey Oswald really had anything against their assassinees victims. Oswald had that whole "agent of history" thing going on, and Czolgosz was just upset about the significant difficulties faced by immigrants in the United States (he himself wasn't an immigrant, but both of his parents were, so he faced many of the same obstacles) and ended up taking it out on the president.

So, since I can't really make anything out of that, I'll try throwing in the other two presidential assassinations. I don't know nearly as much about the assassinations of Presidents Abraham Lincoln and James A. Garfield as I do about the assassinations of McKinley and Kennedy, but I'll give it a shot.

Sorry, poor choice of words.

Anyway, John Wilkes Booth, unlike Czolgszwald (that really doesn't work as well as McKennledy, does it?) did have something specific against his victim. He was a confederate sympathiser upset that the South had lost the Civil War, and he blamed the result of the war on Lincoln (which, to be fair, is pretty reasonable). And then there's Charles Guiteau, the only one of the four presidential assassins that was actually insane. He had supported Garfield in the 1880 election (I'm not sure to what extent he did so; he may have just voted for Garfield) and believed that, because of this, he deserved a spot on Garfield's cabinet. When Garfield, who probably didn't even know who Guiteau was, did not include him in his cabinet, Guiteau got angry and shot the president.

Although all four presidents got shot, the manner in which the assassinations went down varied quite a bit. Booth and Guiteau just walked right up and shot their victims - Booth in a theater during a performance and Guiteau at one of Garfield's speeches. Then the government decided that it might be a good idea to put more effort into protecting the president, so Czolgosz had to get a little creative. At a "meet-the-president" event at the Pan-American Exposition in 1901, where ordinary citizens got to line up for the exciting honor of shaking hands with the president (McKinley, an experienced politician, could shake up to fifty hands per minute - just what we all look for in our politicians), Czolgosz lined up to meet McKinley with his right hand wrapped in a makeshift bandage, so McKinley extended his left hand. All of a sudden, Czolgosz flexed his right hand to throw off the bandage and reveal a gun, which he promptly used to fire off two shots before being tackled by the person behind him in line. Of course, Oswald (and whatever conspirators there may or may not have been) took this up to eleven with what they did.

Libra briefly mentions the mysterious Curator sending Nicholas Branch a 400-page report about the similarities between the assassinations of Lincoln and Kennedy. These weren't really "meaningful" similarities; they were just a set of bizarre coincidences (don't tell David Ferrie). If you don't know about these, you can easily find them online, but here are the ones that I remember:

• Lincoln was elected in 1860, while Kennedy was elected in 1960.
• Both presidents were succeeded by men named Johnson.
• Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, was born in the year exactly 100 years before the birthyear of Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson (sadly, I don't remember what the common last two digits of those years were).
• Both Lincoln and Kennedy were shot by men known by all three of their names, and both assassins had a total of fifteen letters in their names.
• Lincoln was assassinated in Ford's Theater, and Kennedy was assassinated in a car built by Ford Motor Co. - a Ford Lincoln.
• Booth shot Lincoln in a theater and ran into a warehouse. Oswald shot Kennedy from a warehouse and ran into a theater.
• A week before Lincoln was assassinated, he was in Monroe, Maryland. A week before Kennedy was assassinated, he was with Marilyn Monroe.*

*EDIT: Sadly, I have discovered that this last one is inaccurate.

Finally, I leave you all with one interesting fact related (in varying degrees of directness) to each assassination other than McKinley's (if you want to know more about that one, just ask me to e-mail you a copy of my semester project, although you may have to wait until after we present them in class), ordered by increasing degree of interestingness (shut up, that's totally a word):

• Pluto, the astrological symbol for death, was directly above Dallas when John F. Kennedy was born.
• Abraham Lincoln was the first president to be photographed at his inauguration. In the photograph, he is standing just a few meters away from John Wilkes Booth.

And finally:

• Charles Guiteau intentionally chose a fancy-looking rifle to use to shoot James A. Garfield so that it would look nice in a museum after the assassination.