In Libra, there is no shortage of strange or interesting characters. Delillo makes a point of giving almost all of his characters traits that stand out, even the historically accurate ones aren’t safe from having their minds looked into. He pieces together strands of evidence from a variety of sources, from the largest most investigated pieces to the smallest ones that just can’t be explained. For this elaborate conspiracy, he fabricates an Agency that has ALL of the data, and the one who has to make sense of it is Nicholas Branch. We don’t learn a lot about him, just that he’s meant to create a complete, real, top-secret history of the Kennedy assassination (and by the end he really doesn’t have many definitive conclusions). All of his data is provided by “the Curator”, who we know even less about.
The Curator gives Branch too much data, so much data that he believes they’re mocking him, but withholds some like how “after repeated requests, Branch has learned from the Curator that Theodore J. Mackey, known as T-Jay, was born Joeseph Michael Horniak..” (Delillo 301-302). Why give so much information but omit other pieces? Later in the book it’s stated that the Agency is a ‘closed system’ and that Branch’s report will stay in the CIA’s private collection, so why not just give all of the information available? Delillo really doesn’t go into the nuances of the Curator or the Agency, but I’d really like to know why it’s so vague. Maybe they don’t really want a complete history after all? Maybe in flooding Branch with so much information about the case it guarantees that it’ll never be solved?
Branch comes to a similar conclusion at the end of one of the last chapters where he’s mentioned, “he wonders if the Agency is protecting something very much like its identity… its theology of secrets.” (Delillo 442). In the end, Branch is confined to his room of endless paper and notes, seemingly forever. Throughout the book he isn’t mentioned much, so why mention him or the Agency at all? I think Delillo wanted to offer as many explanations as possible, like the possibility that somewhere some secret organization has all the answers that they won’t share.
I view the "secret CIA internal history" idea in this novel as a deliberate kind of hypothetical: with the popular belief that the CIA "knows everything" about all kinds of conspiracies, and the semi-annual flurry of interest every time some new trove of CIA documents about the JFK affair are declassified, there's something very tempting about the idea of a "true history" whose truth depends on it remaining confidential. This is (hypothetically) the story the CIA would tell itself about the historical event, without any political incentive to distort or reframe the narrative in any way. And the almost "mocking" amount of material they continue to send to Branch also evokes the truly trivial level of detail contained in the official (26-volume) report: a lot of the stuff DeLillo mentions (related to the historical characters; there's nothing about TJ Mackey or Bobby Dupard in the Warren Commission report) is drawn directly from the Warren Commission. It's such a quintessentially postmodern situation, for a larger quantity of data and information to be seen as a "mockery" of the person trying to reconstruct the past. We generally have this empirical faith that if we *just knew ENOUGH* about an event, we could construct an accurate narrative. DeLillo in a way mocks HIMSELF as the author, the Branch-figure in this very book, trying hard to assemble a coherent narrative using the tools of fiction, but also wading through a flood of data and information, much of which only serves to muddy the waters.
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