Politics of Conspiracy: Ideology, Surveillance, and the Cold War in Don DeLillo’s Libra

Abstract

Don DeLillo’s Libra (1988) reimagines the assassination of President John F. Kennedy through the lens of Cold War paranoia, exploring how systems of surveillance and ideological manipulation shaped American consciousness in the late twentieth century. Set amid the turbulent politics of the 1960s, the novel reconstructs the assassination not as an isolated act of violence but as a manifestation of deeper institutional anxieties rooted in the Cold War’s culture of secrecy. Through his fragmented narrative and multi-perspectival storytelling, DeLillo exposes how ideology becomes a tool of control and how the surveillance state transforms individuals into both subjects and agents of conspiracy. This paper argues that Libra dramatizes the collapse of historical certainty and critiques the myth of American freedom by revealing the entanglement of power, paranoia, and narrative construction. Engaging with theories of postmodernism (Lyotard, Jameson, Baudrillard), ideology (Althusser), and surveillance (Foucault), the study situates Libra as a quintessential postmodern critique of the Cold War order and its lingering effects on identity and truth.