“There was no way of knowing anything for sure,” Jake acknowledges, although the twist of the book is that he knows almost everything, coming from the future as he does. To make the story work, after all, King has to come down firmly on one side or the other it’s impossible to stop a crime if you don’t know who your target is. Such issues motivate “11/22/63,” which deals with a man named Jake Epping, who goes back in time to derail Kennedy’s date with death. There must be meaning to the story, such a belief insists, when, in fact, it’s just as likely that there wasn’t any. These are parlor game questions, but at their center resides a curious belief in logic, or order, another form of the conspiracist’s faith. What seems more probable - that Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy or that he was taken out by a loser with a mail-order rifle and a grudge against the world? If at the heart of all conspiracy theories is the notion that the universe makes sense (a version, in its way, of the belief in God), then I’ve come to think more often that the universe is a manifestation of chaos, in which things happen for no reason or for no reason we can see. I’ve gone back and forth on this myself for nearly 40 years: Did Oswald act alone or was he a patsy, as he protested on the night of the assassination in the custody of the Dallas police? Was he part of a conspiracy or a twisted figure intent on blasting his way into the history books?įor a long time, I thought it was the former, but now I’m not so sure. There it is, the ultimate underpinning of every Kennedy conspiracy ever invented, the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald was not a worthy foil. “If such a non-entity destroyed the leader of the most powerful nation on earth, then a world of disproportion engulfs us, and we live in a universe that is absurd.” Kennedy assassination - with an epigraph from Norman Mailer’s “Oswald’s Tale.” “It is virtually not assimilable to our reason that a small lonely man felled a giant in the midst of his limousines, his legions, his throng, and his security,” Mailer writes. Stephen King opens his novel “11/22/63” - billed as an alternate universe reimagining of the John F.

Stephen king jfk book