We the audience, curled up in a desk chair watching the Zapruder Tape while we work on our homework or go down a Reddit conspiracy theory rabbit hole on our SmartTV, know with grim irony how futile Jackie’s attempts were. We already know the ending as she tried to hold her husband’s head together in the backseat of that car in Dealey Plaza, rounding the dogleg on the ride to Parkland Hospital. We know with the harsh light of history that this is no fixable injury, these are no ordinary landmarks. We feel sick pity at Jackie’s strange if understandable behavior. But aren’t we—all of us who seek sanity and peace after the futile possibility of either has been unceremoniously blown across the pavement—still sitting in the backseat of that presidential limousine? Aren’t we still sitting there in traumatized naïveté, trying to hold together the last best chance that our country had at peace? Trying to hold fragmented peace together in a hyperviolent world?

There’s one other heartbreaking moment that I think revealed Jackie Kennedy as only the first in a nation of people traumatized in the wake of JFK’s death. During her testimony to the Warren Commission in 1964, she described that same piece of skull that she leapt onto the trunk to retrieve. “I could see a piece of his skull sort of wedge-shaped, like that, and I remember that it was flesh colored with little ridges at the top.” Her description is gut-wrenching. I feel like it reads like a childhood memory. Like the fixation you remember from touching your mother’s dress, or watching a grown-up’s foot bounce during a conversation that you can’t understand, or seeing the shape that the bark makes on a tree without dooming it to be only bark and tree. There’s a purity that is removed from any greater structure or abstraction. She isn’t describing her husband. She sees this removed object that is its own thing out in the world. Something vaguely fleshy, vaguely humanoid, but ultimately a thing. A subject of a Dadaist sculpture or a Dali painting. The second JFK was killed he was transformed from a man into a system of signifiers and things. Things that have taken on new lives outside of him. A martyr for world peace converted into a system of his constituent parts. Since he died we’ve pitifully sought comfort and truth in those relics.

But we all know that when it comes to JFK there is no truth that comes without struggle. This is what makes Douglass’ dive into his career and death so impressive. He understands that contest for the truth and he matches it with focused rigor. There is a feeling of slow and controlled information explosion throughout JFK and the Unspeakable that I think lends it incredible power. As we move from the Bay of Pigs to the Cuban Missile Crisis to Vietnam and ultimately to Dealey Plaza, there feels like an almost linear increase in the attention to detail and respect for the subject that Douglass has. By the time this book reaches the end of JFK’s life there are almost a thousand footnotes in the final chapter alone. History expands like a camera zooming in on a wound or a spaceship slowing to an infinite and elongated stop as it approaches the event horizon of a black hole.

Body parts and bullet holes and an avalanche of personal notes, depositions, and declassified records become secondhand relics in the hands of strangers. Fragments from what was once John F. Kennedy’s skull are named after their finders and become the subject of career-altering debate. Unimportant actions of unimportant people suddenly become pivotal in the history of the United States. Gloved black hands reach in and scatter pieces around the chessboard everywhere. The validity of these relics comes into question as relics are always wont to do. But Douglass stays committed. He takes as his guiding light the words of 20th century Trappist monk Thomas Merton, who fought for peace during Kennedy’s administration. His scaffold of “the Unspeakable” comes from Merton:

“The Unspeakable is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said; the void that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of abyss.”

And boy, if that doesn’t describe the ocean of information that’s been left in the wake of the events of November 22, 1963. As we approach the white hot moment at the center of everything, the whole story becomes as unstable as a nuclear reactor, even for one as careful as Douglass. Footnotes become obligatory tethers to reality, threads of floss holding down a gigantic mythological creature. Trying to hold it in place for long enough to say anything about it with confidence.

Perhaps the only other aphorism that could’ve predicted the world created by JFK’s assassination comes from mathematician Kurt Gödel:

“Any consistent formal system[…]is incomplete; i.e. there are statements of the language of the system which can neither be proved nor disproved in the system.”

In other words for a set of assertions to encompass every possible assertion someone could make, it would have to include both the assertion and its opposite. So Douglass’ job takes on ironic difficulty when we realize that his job isn’t to add to this system but to remove the contrasting detritus.

But then who first tried to complete this dark system? Who littered it with the contradictions that have, by this time, become only memes? We pretend these designers are a shadowy and unknowable cabal. That helps us assign cause-and-effect in some vague way without assigning blame. But there is blame to be had. Those at fault have had their names etched in marble after a successful coup and subversion of peace. Curtis LeMay. David Atlee Phillips. Richard Bissell. McGeorge Bundy. Henry Cabot Lodge. Lucien Conein. Guy Bannister. David Ferris. Sergio Arcacha Smith. Emilio Santana. Jack Ruby. Allen Dulles. There are more that are known and more that are knowable. These people are real and they may be blamed. They are as human as the victims of their violence. Not just JFK but the thousands, millions that have been killed by their choices. It’s easy sometimes, in history, to put up our hands in resignation in the face evil enacted by the Unspeakable. But this temptation has to be resisted. History can be a harsh floodlight that exposes hopelessness, like the mountain of footnotes that wash over JFK’s demise. But history can also be a floodlight to wash over the perpetrators of evil. It can shine on our present.

Walter Benjamin liked to talk about the “synchronicity” of history. How certain moments in history are only parseable after the fact, once a moment in the future resonates at just the right frequency to harmonize with a moment in the past. Certainly it seems that now, in the dark grips of new cabals—inheritors of the secrets of the old cabals—that our present is harmonizing with the occult machinery that crushed the United States’ best attempts at peace in 1963. If the Warren Commission Report can be the perfect manifestation of the twentieth century Joycean novel, as people like Don DeLillo and Werner Herzog say, then is it a stretch to claim that six million heavily redacted files containing emails between our modern avatars of the Unspeakable is the twenty first century’s own perfect novel? If that doesn’t give hope for our ability to name and hang the people that make up these cabals for their crimes, it should at least give hope that we will have literary art with us to guide the way through history’s spiraling labyrinth.

Of course I can’t help leaving off with Pynchon, an old colleague of the Unspeakable who found synchronicity in his own time around the death of JFK with the scramble to establish a petrotechnical cartel in the power vacuum left after WWII, right around the time the old CIA was getting its start:

“Spies and big business, in their element, move tirelessly among the grave markers. Be assured there are ex-young men, here in this very city, faces Slothrop used to pass in the quads, who got initiated at Harvard into the Puritan Mysteries: who took oaths in dead earnest to respect and to act always in the name of Vanitas, Emptiness, their ruler . . . who now according to life-plan such-and-such have come here to Switzerland to work for Allen Dulles and his “intelligence” network, which operates these days under the title “Office of Strategic Services.” But to initiates OSS is also a secret acronym: as a mantra for times of immediate crisis they have been taught to speak inwardly oss . . . oss, the late, corrupt, Dark-age Latin word for bone.”

Perhaps we can appropriate the mantra for ourselves and draw power from the shatterbone relics of one of the great American martyrs in his brave fight against the Unspeakable. Such talismans of realism and hope become important when we face an evil that gains power from abstraction and helpless despair.