Nubar Alexanian/Sony Pictures

In the Nov. 13 issue of the Book Review, the documentarian Errol Morris reviews Stephen King’s new novel, “11/22/63.” The book, like the film Morris is currently completing, is about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Because of their overlapping interests, and because Mr. Morris’s technique as a filmmaker is to chase down every clue, he requested an interview with Mr. King after finishing his review. The resulting Q. and A. is below, with Mr. Morris’s introduction. — The Editors

Shane Leonard

Stephen King’s new novel inhabits a gray area between fact and fiction. It tells the story of Lee and Marina Oswald in the years leading up to the Kennedy assassination. But this isn‘t just historical fiction; it’s a fictional vision of a historical event that has never been satisfactorily explained. To write the true history of the Kennedy assassination, we need to know it. But how much do we know of what really happened?

King believes that Oswald is guilty, and argues in terms of the stories we tell about that day: “Early in the novel,” he writes in an afterword, “Jake Epping’s friend Al puts the probability that Oswald was the lone gunman at 95 percent. After reading a stack of books and articles on the subject almost as tall as I am, I’d put the probability at 98 percent, maybe even 99. Because all of the accounts, including those written by conspiracy theorists, tell the same simple American story: here was a dangerous little fame junkie who found himself in the right place to get lucky.”

Q.

Errol Morris: Aren’t you going to have to deal with that whole lone gunman versus conspiracy thing? The endless debates about what really happened?

A.

Stephen King: Well, I’ll tell you what. I’m prepared for trouble when the book comes out. Conspiracy people guard themselves pretty jealously. They have their theories and some of them are pretty complex, and some of them are pretty simple. Some of them have been disproved. But one of the things that sticks in my mind is that none of them has been proved. None of them. So it’s like U.F.O.s… If they’re really U.F.O.s, how come one has never landed, or we’ve never been given definitive proof?

Q.

But, do you have to resolve these questions? Is it even possible? Nearly 50 years later, people are still arguing about it. In the afterword, you caution people that this is not history.

Patricia Wall/The New York Times

A.

No. It is a novel.

Q.

But resolved or unresolved, the mystery of what happened stands behind everything. It is perhaps unavoidable. There are cases where you have the feeling of puzzle pieces coming together. Where the evidence leads to a conclusion. But there are other cases that devolve into chaos, confusion. The Kennedy assassination, I would argue, is one of them. The question is, why? What happened? Why did it become an investigative morass?

A.

Well, the reason is, I would say, because Ruby shot Oswald. And when Ruby shot Oswald, he shut his mouth. He permanently silenced him. So there was never any light cast from that standpoint. As a result, you have all these witnesses who stepped forward who saw this and saw that and saw guys on the grassy knoll and this and that and the other thing. It’s a little bit like the blind man describing the elephant. One’s got the trunk and says it’s a snake. And one’s got a leg and says it’s a tree. One’s got an ear and says it’s a banana plant. They all say different things because none of them can see the whole thing. The only one who could really tell us what happened is dead. I’m not saying he would have, but I think he would have, I believe he would have, if he did it. And I do think he did it.

Q.

You mention in your afterword Thomas Mallon’s novel “Mrs. Paine’s Garage.”

[Mallon chronicles the relationship between the Oswalds and the Paines, Quakers who befriended them. They are of particular historical interest because Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano rifle was stored in the Paines’ garage.]

Associated Press

A.

Yes. He has a good take on conspiracy people. And Norman Mailer, who provides an epigram at the beginning of the book, says people find it very difficult to believe it could have happened the way it happened because it suggests an absurd universe. But there it is. The line is pretty conclusive to me. The mail-order gun that he bought — he used that gun to try to shoot Gen. Edwin Walker. And that’s the gun that was found at the depository with his fingerprints on it. And then he ran, he shot the police officer J. D. Tippit, and they caught him. To me, that’s it. The chain of events seems outrageous, but let me tell you a story. This happened a couple of weeks ago in the Midwest. This guy won the lottery, he won a million dollars or something on the lottery. Maybe it was multimillions. But you know how it is, it’s a great human interest story. So the press comes and this film crew from one of the local stations says to him, “We want to recreate you winning the lottery.” You know where this is going, right?

Q.

I’m not sure.

“The book that I wrote is a time-travel story.” — Stephen King

A.

Bear with me. So they went to the store where he had bought the scratch ticket and won the million dollars. And they filmed, and he scratched the ticket and he said, “Holy — I just won another $100,000.” Now, that’s the sort of thing where if you’re not there, if you’re not part of it, you just say to yourself, “This is just absurd.” But it happens all the time. Oswald just happened to be at the right place at the right time. He and his wife were effectively done, and she was living with Mrs. Paine out in Irving. He used to come on the weekends, but that week, he came on Thursday — the night before the assassination. And it seems pretty clear from his actions and from the things he said that he had decided to do this, but that he could be persuaded to change his mind. He and Marina went to bed that night and in bed, he asked her, “Is there a chance that we can get back together?” And she was very cold to him. She said, “No, I don’t think that’s ever going to happen, Lee.” And in the morning, he left his wedding ring and he left all the money in his pockets in a teacup in the kitchen for her. And that was it. There is this chain of ifs, but really, it’s as simple as that. He wanted to shoot somebody. He wanted to be somebody famous. It’s all there. The pieces all click together pretty nicely.

Q.

And yet you don’t really believe in coincidences, do you?

A.

Yes, I do. The book that I wrote is a time-travel story. The coincidences are minimized by this idea that the past tries to echo itself over and over again. But it’s not fate when somebody wins the lottery. Some guy picks numbers, or the computer picks numbers, and those numbers come up. You know? It’s a coincidental world.

Q.

You have created a rabbit hole into the past. But the Kennedy assassination has always struck me as the mother of all rabbit holes. You disappear into it and never emerge again. The books get longer and longer as people write them. They started out at a couple of hundred pages. And now, the books have metastasized. Vincent Bugliosi’s book, “Reclaiming History,” is, I don’t know, more than a thousand pages. With a CD-ROM that adds a couple of thousand more.

A.

Yes. That’s one I didn’t read. The Mailer book, “Oswald’s Tale,” is 800 pages long. That’s a pretty long one. He goes way back to Marina’s antecedents in Russia and all the rest. But when people bring it up, I’m just going to say, “You believe what you believe.” My wife believes it’s a conspiracy.

Q.

You mentioned that in the afterword, that you and your wife disagreed.

A.

She loved John Kennedy in a way that I never did. I grew up in a Republican household, though my mother cried her eyes out when Kennedy got shot. Little John-John salutes the casket when it goes by. You couldn’t help it, whether you were Republican or Democrat. I don’t know what would happen now, but I do know one of the reasons to write the book was because there’s so much hate in the air now, so much hate. A lot of it’s directed at Obama. I think I decided I wanted to write this book when Obama was giving the State of the Union speech and that guy shouted, “You lie!” You know? It’s a real change in American politics, and it goes back to Kennedy, because people hated that guy, too, until he died.

Q.

One of the things that I liked about the book is what I keep thinking of as twin mysteries. There’s the mystery of whether one man can change the world by going back in time. Will it be for the better or for the worse?

A.

Right, the consequences.

Q.

Yes, the consequences of changing the world, if one could do so. The other thing, which I really, really like, is that even if we go back into the past, history remains a mystery. Is Lee Harvey Oswald guilty? Your protagonist still has to investigate, because he’s a good man. He doesn’t want to kill somebody just for the sake of killing somebody. It would be immoral, it would be wrong.

A.

It would be wrong.

Q.

Before he can act, he has to give himself some assurance that he’s acting correctly, that he’s acting responsibly. So all of that stuff, placing the surveillance equipment in the Oswald apartment —

A.

Oh God, that was hard. The guy and his wife spoke Russian the whole time. That was the worst part of writing the book. I hope it’s not too boring.

Q.

I loved that part. What was so hard about it?

A.

Well, there was certain information I wanted to put across about how they got along and about Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother, who was just a harridan. And his feelings about socialism, how they changed, how he felt about Cuba. And I thought, the guy lives across the street. I don’t want a lot of technological huggermugger; I don’t really want to get bogged down in a lot of detail, you know?

Q.

There are these forces of malefaction, and then there’s one scene that I wanted to ask you about, where you make your argument for why Kennedy is a good man. It’s this moment with a gentleman in an alpine hat and lederhosen.

A.

Where the guy’s playing “Hail to the Chief” on the accordion for the president. It’s one of my favorite things in the whole book. You can watch it online. It’s one of the places where you see Kennedy as a real guy. I think it’s Tampa. And it’s the same car, and Kennedy does the same thing where he gets out of the car and he walks into the crowd. You can see the Secret Service people are just going absolutely nuts about this. And there’s not a thing they can do about it, because that’s the way he was. He really wanted to be with people and touch people.

“I don’t want a lot of technological huggermugger; I don’t really want to get bogged down in a lot of detail, you know?” — Stephen King

Q.

And you liked it so much because — ?

A.

Because it was human. You know, it was just a human moment. It humanizes him, and changes him. It’s a first-person narrative, and the best I could do is to try to humanize people from afar. See Oswald a little bit, and show that he’s not completely a monster. He did apparently love his kids. He didn’t beat them. He only beat his wife. I didn’t want them to be figures on a chessboard, O.K.? Best I can do. It’s a sentimental book in a lot of ways, but sentiment’s a part of life. I tried not to wallow in it.

Q.

But there’s also evil.

A.

Well, I try to shy away from the word “evil” because it’s so simple to say, “Well, these things happen because there’s evil in the world.” And as you say, most of it’s just little evil. But if it’s all connected — maybe it is big evil. And maybe we don’t need to say that right out loud.

Q.

I also wanted to ask you about the difficulty of actually writing something that is connected with real history.

A.

Well, I never tried anything like that before, and I’m not sure that I would ever want to try again, because, man, it was too much like work. I mean, I’ve done stuff that’s used reality as a base before. In this case, that’s why I stopped the first time I tried it. I was teaching school, and it was 1971 and I was in the teachers’ room and people were talking about the Kennedy assassination. The 22nd would roll around and people would talk and write about the assassination and stuff. I guess somebody must have said, “What would it have been like if Kennedy had lived?” And I thought to myself, “I’d love to write a story about that.” But there are so many real people, and there’s the whole idea of trying to integrate the past and make it real. And it just seemed too big to me at that time, and it was big. I’ve still got a roomful of research materials. Then once you start, the other trick is to not make it into something that’s boring, that’s all history: “Look what I read, and here are these interesting facts.” I didn’t want to do a James Michener thing.

Q.

Well, your romance intersects with history. It’s not historical per se. It’s a love story, and the fact that you’re off in a small town and not in the middle of everything allows you to write something that goes well beyond a collection of facts.

A.

Yes, a real novel. But most of the stuff about Oswald and Marina that I thought is interesting is true, and a lot of the stuff about Marguerite Oswald is true. I just tried not to overwhelm the reader with it.

Q.

And the idea of making the future worse?

A.

Well, that was always going to be the kicker for the book. When I actually sat down to write the book, I started to ask people — my wife was a history major and I asked her, “Well, what would have happened if Kennedy had lived?” And I asked some other people. Finally, I went to Doris Kearns Goodwin, who was an aide for Johnson in those days, and her husband, Dick Goodwin, who was part of the Kennedy team. And I asked them to sort of spitball about things that might have happened if Kennedy had lived. And one of the things they pointed out –– it’s a weakness with Obama, too –– Kennedy was inexperienced enough to have a real difficult time dealing with the Senate and the House of Representatives. Johnson was much better at it. He was able to push a lot of stuff through. He was very canny about it. Johnson said, “Well, we ought to do this, this and this to help memorialize our dead Jack Kennedy.” And so we got the civil rights thing and a bunch of other stuff as well, including Medicare, I think.

Q.

And the chances that Kennedy would have done this or have been able to do this–––

A.

A lot smaller. It was Doris who said – I thought of this, but it just seemed so wild – Wallace might really have gotten elected in 1968. It’s fascinating, though, isn’t it? That one minute – less than a minute – in Dallas, and everything’s up for grabs. I believe in those watershed moments. In 1999, I got hit by a van and almost killed. I was out taking a walk in the afternoon; I’ve thought back on that many times. And I’m thinking if I’d left a minute earlier or if I’d left a minute later, if I’d stayed another 15 minutes at lunch, if somebody had dropped by — if, if, if. But those things didn’t happen, so I happened to be at that one particular place at that one particular time. And something happened that changed my life. Today, it probably doesn’t matter if we talk until 10 minutes of 1 or 10 minutes past 1, things are going to go pretty much as planned. Most days, they do. But not always.

Q.

Did you change your view of the past at all in writing this?

A.

I don’t think so. I think that it clarified a little bit. When you write about the past, the more you write, the clearer the past becomes. It’s like being regressed under hypnosis. My view of the past is that attitudes change, but they change very slowly. Underneath, they stay pretty much the same. “The fundamental things apply as time goes by.”

Q.

Indeed. Your protagonist is sort of guilt-tripped into the past. He wasn’t even alive when Kennedy was shot. But he has nothing to lose; his life is a shambles.

“My view of the past is that attitudes change, but they change very slowly. Underneath, they stay pretty much the same.” — Stephen King

A.

Well, it’s true that he doesn’t have much of a life in 2011. He goes back into the past and finds a life, which is probably another kind of romantic, sentimental idea, but I like it. I like the idea that he finds somewhere that he would like to stay, and I like it at the end he realizes that he cannot. If he learns anything, he learns that you have to leave things alone. Things are better left the way that they are.

Q.

Do you think that’s true?

A.

No, I don’t think it’s true for us, because we can’t see the future. We don’t know the influence that our actions have. It’s something that’s unique to the time-traveler’s story; he’s screwing with the cogs and wheels of the universe. But for most of us, we go along and we do the best that we can and we try not to hurt other people. Most of us do, anyway. I guess there are always, you know, the Ted Bundys of the world. If you could go back and stop Hitler or something like that, you would, wouldn’t you?

Q.

Would I stop Hitler? Yes.

A.

Yes, sure you would.

Q.

My mother’s dead, but I think my mother would be proud of me.

A.

But, of course, she wouldn’t know who Hitler was. Because he would have been totally whisked off the stage. This book is, in a way, like a photo negative of my novel “The Dead Zone.” In that book, Johnny Smith is the guy in the high place with the rifle who feels like he’s seen the future. He’s seen this guy, Greg Stillson, and he sees what he’s going to do when he becomes president, because he has this precognitive talent. And he feels like he has to kill him. At the last moment, fate intervenes. I got really uncomfortable with the idea of saying, “Well, under certain circumstances, assassination is a good thing.” And this book is a chance to do it the other way and to take the assassination back.

Q.

Philosophers have endlessly speculated about the nature of evil. Why there has to be evil –

A.

Well, it does seem to me that, without evil, there is no good, because we wouldn’t have anything to compare it to.

Q.

But in your novel, history seems to involve a kind of balancing act between good and evil. We don’t know the interrelationship of things. What you call the “butterfly effect”: change one thing in the hope of making the world a better place, and something’s going to happen to make the world even worse.

A.

Well, Ray Bradbury called it the butterfly effect before me. It’s also been called the Rube Goldberg effect – where you see the world as an infernal machine. When you pull Lever A, Spring B hits Cog C. The next thing you know, the models are all over the floor. I’m not saying it’s the way things are, but it’s certainly plausible. I tried as much as I could when I wrote the book not to get caught up in any of the paradoxes and things that go along with time travel.

Q.

Well, the book is really not about time travel per se.

A.

Not at all. Not at all. It’s just a device.

Q.

It’s a device to allow us to examine fate, love, memory, history. And as such, it’s truly compelling.

A.

You know what? It’s like “Gulliver’s Travels.” Swift never goes into this big long thing about well, there was a genetic mutation and therefore these people became small, and all the rest. We don’t really care about that. It’s just the idea: they’re there. Then we can use it to examine real life.