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.
Oswald's "instability" has actually served to (mostly) seal off one of the most attractive angles for conspiracy theorists (starting with Marguerite)--the idea that he was working for the KGB or the CIA (or both, in some overlapping "false defector" scenario), and that everything starting with his "defection" is not what it appears. The KGB agents who dealt with him in Russia were quite clear about this in interviews (among others, those included in the Frontline doc): He was decisively not "agent material." Ironically (perhaps), his "suicide attempt" in Moscow would have been the first sign of this unreliability and emotional instability--not what either agency is looking for in a spy! So his crazy last-ditch effort to get some attention is precisely the thing that deems him unworthy of attention. (And, weirdly, this ends up generating some sympathy for Lee on the reader's part--we want him to be able to pursue his dream of being a James Bond type of spy, even if we'd have to agree with the KGB's assessment.)
ReplyDeleteOf course, Mackey et al. want him to be their "agent," and they face a similar dilemma with the scales that could tip either way.