Somewhere along the line, however, the plot to fake an assassination attempt becomes a plot to commit an assassination – and the key figure, the fall guy, the patsy, becomes one Lee Harvey Oswald. I can remember the last name of the pilot, Powers, who had a strange death himself after the Soviets let him go.

You like him for showing kindness to persecuted impoverished black men; you hate him for beating his wife.Which makes him a too-good-to-be-true instrument for a plot by current and ex-CIA operatives (as well as by disgruntled Bay of Pigs veterans) to find someone to take a shot at President Kennedy. I similarly enjoyed learning about Oswald's defection to the USSR, his marriage to a Russian woman, and the importance U-2 aircraft play in the story.

Libra received critical acclaim and earned DeLillo the inaugural Irish Times International Fiction Prize, as well as a nomination for the 1988 National Book Award for Fiction.Both of these acts happening simultaneously, reflected the enormous speeding forces of history that I was about to witness in this novel, moving toward its endpoint. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. For example, each of the three former CIA operatives is attempting to shift the scales back in their favor after they were mistreated following the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion. For me, a vast conspiracy – one in which some combination of pro-Castro Cubans and anti-Castro Cubans and the CIA and the FBI and the Mafia and Lyndon Johnson and Southern white supremacists seamlessly coordinate and execute a successful criminal conspiracy that goes forever undetected – seems none too plausible. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.

When "history" presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the president will galvanize the nation against communism, the scales are irrevocably tipped. So I looked and stared and rummaged and poked and turned affadavits over in my hand and ran the tape found in the camera up Marilyn Monroe's backside, all of that. A gripping, masterful blend of fact and fiction, alive with meticulously portrayed characters both real and created, Libra is a grave, haunting, and brilliant examination of an event that has become an indelible part of the American psyche. Oswald shown from his childhood in the Bronx, through his service in Japan, his romance with Marxism and stay in the Soviet Union until his death from Jack Ruby’s hand. It takes so long to read Libra, it's such a slog through all this stuff which might have gone down like that or might on the other hand, or not, or partly.

He was deeply invested in the drug trade in Cuba before Fidel Castro came to power, and he believes he will profit if Castro is overthrown. This is the question author Don DeLillo (1936-present) considers in his 1988 historical fiction novel Libra.