11/22/63, Stephen King’s novel, in which a time traveler stalks Lee Harvey Oswald through history in an attempt to prevent the Kennedy assassination, is a wonderful and maddening read. It is King’s storytelling at its bravura best, a detective tale in which the hero must not only penetrate a complex mystery but do so while tip-toeing through the paradoxes of time travel.
But it is also the most dramatic exposure of his inchoate politics and infantile Baby Boomer obsessions. The belief that Kennedy’s assassination precluded an early end to the Vietnam war, the idée fixe of his time-traveling vigilante, is Camelot mythology at its silliest: Kennedy was a Cold War liberal who pledged at his inaugural to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” Less than three weeks before his own assassination, Kennedy fulfilled his promise by okaying a military coup that ended in the death of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, who in Kennedy’s eyes was not prosecuting the war with sufficient vigor.
Like the book, critic Glenn Garvin explains, 11.22.63 is extraordinary entertainment if you’re able to shrug off the political idiocies that broadly shape it and simply immerse yourself in the story.
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