American Confidential by Deanne Stillman
The shot Lee Harvey Oswald fired on Nov. 22, 1963, continues to reverberate 60 years on. Although conspiracy theories circulated in America since the nation’s birth, public disbelief in the Warren Report allowed the poison of conspiracy paranoia to seep from the backwaters into the mainstream. The septic outcome includes the failed January 6 coup and the continued election denials by a defeated former president. The Kennedy assassination is the national trauma from which there has been no recovery.
By now, an entire library is necessary to house all the books concerning John F. Kennedy’s death. American Confidential should be on the top shelf among the most well-reasoned.
With a novelist’s sense for narrative and character, author Deanne Stillman composed a non-fiction account of the Oswald family and Lee Harvey’s place in it. According to Stillman, the role of the assassin’s mother, Marguerite, is the key to understanding the gunman’s actions. The plot of American Confidentialwill remind film buffs of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho or Marne, where the damage done by a mother to her child explains the behavior of the central character.
By all accounts, Oswald was a troubled child and a damaged adult. Stillman goes further than other commentators by locating Oswald and mom in the context of American gun culture, countering stories aired over the years that he couldn’t have been the assassin because he was a bad shot. In reality, he knew his way around rifles since childhood. Oswald’s gun problem was part of a larger American problem of irresponsible libertarianism. As Stillman puts it, “the credo of the Wild West—‘It’s a free country and I can do what I want,’”—summarizes the crude ideology he received from his mother, a woman whose social grievance was married to a sense of entitlement she could never fulfill.
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To explain Marguerite, Stillman turns to hardboiled fiction and film noir. She “had certain things in common with such characters as Mildred Pierce.” Stillman also compares her to Amanda Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, one of those “sad outcasts of Dixie.” Born in New Orleans, Marguerite grew up near the streetcar bound for Desire, truly and not only in metaphor. The mother-son team of The Grifters also “evokes the strange and harrowing dynamic between Marguerite and Lee Harvey Oswald.” The promise and failure of the American Dream can be read into their story.
Stillman’s analysis is buttressed by solid journalistic reporting, weighing mountains of quotes by Marguerite, the Oswald family and their associates for a plausible account. Does Stillman’s profiling tell the whole story? Oswald’s Soviet sojourn remains hard to explain. Did any researcher find the Oswald file in the Russian archives during those brief years when they were open?
Aside from its gift to the conspiracy minded, JFK’s assassination provided a model, perhaps a subliminal one, for recent generations of shooters who kill, as Stillman writes, to “gain attention by becoming idolized or scorned,” a tendency with its own circle in the Venn Diagram of a society “so obsessed with true crime and how and why crimes have happened” that it binges on crime shows and podcasts in a paranoid-inducing spiral.
For Stillman, Oswald was the lone gunman, but he had a muse at his side. “If there’s any conspiracy in the case of the murder of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, it was that of a mother and son in a silent pact—two souls allied against going through life as nobodies, a pair to let everyone know that they mattered.”
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