Don DeLillo's Libra (1988) recreates the assassination of John Kennedy through a series of complex and compelling perspectives designed to capture the event as a truly American tragedy.

The title refers to Lee Harvey Oswald's birth sign, suggesting that he was a classical "negative Libra," in that he lacked a real sense of his identity. DeLillo tells his story, alternating it with the author's account of a conspiracy instigated by some renegade CIA operatives designed to set up an attempted assassination of the president that could be made to look like a Cuban plot. Their aim is to create a groundswell of popular feeling for the invasion of Cuba that would topple Castro. Their allies in this plot are members of the exiled Cuban community and a New Orleans mafioso, who longs for the return of Havana's prerevolutionary days when the hotels and casinos were mob-owned. For the conspirators, Oswald's availability as a "lone gunman" figure is a happy accident, providing them with a convenient fall guy. In fact,in the novel's construction the bullet that actually kills Kennedy comes not from Oswald's gun but from one fired from the nearby grassy knoll.

However, the bulk of the novel concentrates on the character of Oswald, the ultimate outsider in search of a script in which he will play the major role, that of presidential assassin, as the critic Frank Lentricchia points out. His death on television is the perfect conclusion to a life in which print and electronic media have replaced actual reality, giving a narrative shape to an otherwise meaningless existence.

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