Libra is concerned with the most dangerous of games, the clandestine political-psychological warfare that one initiate calls "a class project in the structure of reality" (125). The novel's narrative frame is a secret CIA history of the Kennedy assassination, researched by an officer with the heavily significant name of Branch. Like Jameson, Branch is an anti-Enzian, a man who prefers traditional, causally coherent accounts to paranoid speculations. "There is no need, he thinks, to invent the grand and masterful scheme, the plot that reaches flawlessly in all directions" (58). But Branch is finally overcome by the brachiating growth of his monster text, which turns into "the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he'd moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred" (181).

Reading this documentary monstrosity, Branch learns just how dangerous it can be to restructure or textualize reality, ratifying Donna Haraway's sense that "we are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system from all work to all play, a deadly game" (161). The deadly game that Branch uncovers has three aspects: it is a self-assembling sign system, an exercise in insane hermeneutics, and a plot to kill the President. While there is no apparent logic to this machination, there is at least a discernible sequence of events, an overt history which the covert scheme inhabits or possesses. A collection of intelligence officials meet after the Bay of Pigs to plan further action against Castro, possibly including assassination. In the interest of plausible deniability, the plotters construct a pyramidal or cascading hierarchy:

Win [Everett] sat nodding. He and Larry Parmenter had belonged to a group called SE Detailed, six military analysts and intelligence men. The group was one element in a four-stage committee set up to confront the problem of Castro's Cuba. The first stage, the Senior Study Effort, consisted of fourteen high officials, including presidential advisers, ranking military men, special assistants, undersecretaries, heads of intelligence. They met for an hour and a half. Then eleven men left the room, six men entered. The resulting group, called SE Augmented, met for two hours. Then seven men left, four men entered, including Everett and Parmenter. This was SE Detailed, a group that developed specific covert operations and then decided which members of SE Augmented ought to know about these plans. Those members in turn wondered whether the Senior Study Effort wanted to know what was going on in stage three. Chances are they didn't. When the meeting in stage three was over, five men left the room and three paramilitary officers entered to form Leader 4. Win Everett was the only man present at both the third and fourth stages. (20)

The terrible truth, as Everett and Branch independently piece it out, is that the initial desire to oust Castro mutates in its passage through the committees into a plot to kill Kennedy. The Senior Study Effort produces general directives for action against Castro. At the second and third stages, these directives generate plans for a phony assault on the President's motorcade in Miami, ostensibly by Cuban agents, designed to provoke an American invasion. But the paramilitary extremists of Leader 4 launch a major interpretive swerve. Craving revenge against Kennedy for the Bay of Pigs fiasco, they turn the mock assassination into an actual hit. All plots tend to move deathward, but no one can be sure whose death will eventuate. The CIA and the Kennedy cabinet set out to remove Castro; they end up instigating the murder of their own Commander-in-Chief. Branch's "megaton novel" is actually a map of seditious misreading, detonating not so much with explosive revelations but with a horrible implosion of rational causality.

In contrast to Oliver Stone's JFK, DeLillo's conspiracy fiction does not center on political rationalizations. His version includes no plot by military-industrial warhawks to protect their investments in Vietnam. Indeed, there is no real chain of command at all. The cabal assembles itself according to a series of bizarre coincidences, the chief of these being Oswald's first appearance in New Orleans and his purely fortuitous reappearance in Dallas. Like Le Carré, DeLillo seems morbidly fascinated with the power of secret texts; but in DeLillo's world, these texts exist not on paper but in "the structure of reality"; they are not so much fabricated as self-constructed. The plotters include David Ferrie, the paranoid mystic who tells Oswald: "There's a pattern in things. Something in us has an effect on independent events. We make things happen. The conscious mind gives one side only. We're deeper than that" (330). Ferrie is a marginal personality, in DeLillo's fiction as apparently in fact; yet he delivers an important truth about the covert world as DeLillo constructs it. Conspiracy here has less to do with will-to-power than with a more nebulous will-to-connect, the desire to complete a pattern whose full implications are not present to the conscious mind.

The secret pilgrim Branch repeatedly uncovers oblique coincidences and correspondences in the record not just Oswald's strange materializations, but his persistent association with the U-2 spy plane, first in the Marine Corps, later through Ferrie, eventually at his job in Dallas. The plane's designation has an almost emblematic resonance: "like there's me-too and you-too," as one of Oswald's co-workers remarks (274). As Branch moves deeper into the matter, his sensitivity to double senses begins to approximate Ferrie's paranoia. He starts to see the entire conspiracy as an exercise in reduplication: "To Nicholas Branch, more frequently of late, 'Lee H. Oswald' seems a technical diagram, part of some exercise in the secret manipulation of history. A photograph taken by CIA cameras of a man walking past the Soviet embassy in Mexico City bears the identifying tag 'Lee H. Oswald.' Oswald was in Mexico City at the time but the man in the picture is someone else broad-chested, with a full face and cropped hair, in his late thirties or early forties. Another form of double. It's not surprising that Branch thinks of the day and month of the assassination in strictly numerical terms 11/22" (377).

There is indeed a deeper pattern in this plethora of doubles and dualities. The assassination as DeLillo conceives it unfolds in a simulacral order where, just as Baudrillard specifies, "the Right... spontaneously does the work of the Left. All the hypotheses of manipulation are reversible in an endless whirligig. For manipulation is a floating causality where positivity and negativity engender and overlap with one another, where there is no longer any active or passive" (Simulations, 30). All the doublings, the alienations of one into two, are subject to a reconversion or collapse back to unity (you two becomes you too). Oswald the Libran, hanging in the balance, sees himself as both a loyal American and a dedicated leftist; so he is uniquely susceptible to the developing plot, which seems independent of such categories as left and right, patriot and traitor. This is the story of an Immachination, but in it the symmetries are not so much avoided as deconstructed. What happens on 11/22/63 takes place because someone (perhaps Kennedy himself) has played with reality, invoking the quasi-logic of assassination. So events assemble themselves in fatal contingency around Dallas, the American murder capital, which one character describes as "the city that proves that God is really dead" (234). Which is to say, as the poststructuralists remind us, that the signifying chains lead back to no original, no correlatives for good and evil, no standpoint for Providence.

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