The first time I saw Dealey Plaza was this past summer. It’s remarkable how unremarkable the area is after all of these years. You can visit the place of John F. Kennedy’s murder, which happened 46 years ago today, seeing it as close to what it was so long ago, with little but time having changed the surroundings.
The most stunning thing that struck me after seeing the two “X” marks at the exact spots where Pres. Kennedy was hit, is the hard turn on to Elm that the motorcade made. In one of the pictures here you can see that it’s beyond 90 degrees. That turn would never have been part of a modern era motorcade.
Every year a bit more comes out about the Kennedy assassination, recalling history, rehashing horror during what Jackie called the cruelest month.
AMC’s “Mad Men” the best depiction of the impact and aftermath of J.F.K.’s assassination that has ever been done through a TV series. Fitting that Kennedy was made through that same medium. Lives explode. Normal obliterated.
Steven M. Gillon, “resident historian of the History Channel,” has written a new book on the event. On Friday, he was a guest on “Hardball,” with Chris Matthews, who considers himself the only one eligible to render analysis on the continuing confusion surrounding the Kennedy assassination. Both Matthews and Gillon scoffed at the “Grassy Knoll theory,” as it’s called, which many people do not accept and which Gerald Posner analyzes in Case Closed.
Robert F. Kennedy never believed the Warren Commission’s report. While Jackie Kennedy came to believe Oswald had acted alone.
This case will never be closed.
In Vanity Fair this year, the story in The Death of Lancer, the name Kennedy’s Secret Service handle, by William Manchester (aka The Death of a President), likely wouldn’t have shed light on the assassination, but I would have loved to have read it. Adding to the dozens and dozens of books I’ve read about John F. Kennedy. From Vanity Fair on the battle between Manchester and the Kennedys over his book, which they picked him to write:
Certain revelations in the four installments took the public by surprise: Manchester questioned why two middle-aged Secret Service agents with “slowing reflexes” were assigned to President Kennedy, and wondered why they were not routinely tested; the driver of the limousine was 54, and the agent sitting beside the driver was 48. “They were in a position,” Manchester wrote, “to take evasive action after the first shot, but for five terrible seconds they were immobilized.” Readers also learned how Mrs. Kennedy “struggled with a nurse who tried to bar her from the operating room.” And how the president, after being in a crowd the night before their arrival in Dallas, had said to her, “Suppose a man had a pistol in a briefcase.”
From Gillon’s post on Huffington Post recently (who has also written about new revelations on the transfer of power after Kennedy’s death):
McHugh, like most members of the Kennedy entourage, did not know that Johnson was onboard. They believed that the new president was on his own plane flying back to Washington. If LBJ was on the plane, McHugh wanted to see for himself. Since he had not seen Johnson in the aisle — and at 6’4″ Johnson would be tough to miss — McHugh assumed that he must then be in the bedroom. When he checked there Johnson was nowhere to be seen. The only place on the plane he had not inspected was the bathroom in the presidential bedroom.
What McHugh claimed to have witnessed next was shocking. “I walked in the toilet, in the powder room, and there he was hiding, with the curtain closed,” McHugh recalled. He claimed that LBJ was crying, “They’re going to get us all. It’s a plot. It’s a plot. It’s going to get us all.’” According to the General, Johnson “was hysterical, sitting down on the john there alone in this thing.”
As the 21st century dawns, so many people don’t remember what it was like.
Back in J.F.K.’s day, nuclear was the nightmare. It was the urgent danger, the imminent threat little kids grew up dreading. Maybe that’s why the Bush administration used the words, the phrases, the images they did. They knew how it would work. And that’s been the people’s problem ever since those dreadful days in Dallas. Long before color coded dangers of unreality substituted for government communication.
We had yellow and black fallout signs signifying where the nearest shelter was located, the nearest fall out shelter, as in nuclear disaster.
That was our reality, the one J.F.K. was intent on keeping us from living. That Ronald Reagan hoped he could help end, which the tea party activists would never have allowed today. The issue on which Barack Obama has led since he came into office.
There never seemed to be enough of them, fall out shelters, that is. I hunted for them whenever we were away from the house, working out my escape in my head. That was when I actually believed the government was there to protect, could protect us from anything.
At school, we did drills where we hid under our desks, or walked quickly and orderly in mock emergency sessions, staying close to the school building walls until we reached the auditorium, as if nuclear wouldn’t reach that far in. Once assembled, there we would sit, the entire school, until the all clear siren was sounded. The drills were deadly serious in a deathly dangerous time.
That’s why some of us took the fabricated Iraqi threat so personally. We remembered our history, back when the American tide turned forever, making everything between citizen and government ultimately intimate.
It’s also when television became the universe and elected one man president.
In strode John Fitzgerald Kennedy, a man who made Democrats out of Republicans, at least in our house – for one election – and turned television into a movement right in the middle of our living room.
But it wasn’t the assassination we saw on TV. What most people saw instead was the murder of his murderer. Amidst more cops than many of us had ever seen in one place at one time, outside of a parade, the man that supposedly murdered President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was killed before our eyes, the action caught live, on television, on a bright November Sunday morn.
Leave it to Beaver was obliterated.
It was the event that would change the American world and launch television on its journey to where it is today, 24/7, network, cable and beyond.
Birthing perennial questions for posterity: how could this have happened; followed by, what exactly did happen?
The memorial came on Monday. The riderless horse was evocative of America’s emotions, as I was left to wonder what makes a man’s impact so immense that strangers cry at his passing?
In that moment, politics became personal. What kind of president makes people feel like that? That moment in my history spawned my one woman show, “Weeping for J.F.K.,” and changed my life forever. I still have the exact replica of J.F.K.’s favorite rocking chair, which I used in my show, in my office and when I sit in it I still remember the dream.
The unfolding 60’s making matters even worse. Bobby. Martin. Insanity.
Arlen Specter and the Warren Commission became the traitors of a generation. The dueling “magic bullet” and quick assessments of our government seemingly meant as pabulum to soothe the public’s aching heart, sparing us the pain it takes to find the truth.
But were they actually right?
We’ll never know for sure and it has nothing to do with Oliver Stone’s film.
Today, while websites compile data and links, forensics, photo enhancements, and technology can unwind the serendipitous Zapruder film, which shows the assassination of the American president, that when seen in slow motion, as it is always shown, displays graphic detail that inspires grown adults to scream for justice.
Jack Ruby robbed us of that.
And Lee Harvey Oswald robbed of us of everything else.
Like many young couples, Oswald and Marina were obsessed with the Kennedys. Priscilla Johnson McMillan, in her fascinating 1977 account of the Oswalds, Marina and Lee, reports that Marina’s schoolgirl crush on the chestnut-haired president—her mooning over magazine photographs of Kennedy strolling on the beach in his khaki pants, her insisting that Oswald translate for her any articles about the Kennedys—was becoming a sore point in their already troubled marriage. “He is very attractive,” Marina Oswald told her husband. “I can’t say what he is as president, but I mean, as a man.” McMillan writes, “It got so that she would flip through the pages of every magazine she could lay her hands on asking, ‘Where’s Kennedy? Where’s Kennedy?’” – Vanity Fair
Could simple male jealousy really have been the thing that ended an American era?
We will never know for sure. Leaving only questions and mistrust of all we held certain in the days before Dallas that was foreshadowing of a decade long nightmare to come.
Everything was different after President Kennedy died.
The American world that won WWII came apart.
The unraveling led to 50,000 dead in Vietnam, a war begun before J.F.K. that he escalated, but would likely have finished if he’d lived. The illegal bombings of Cambodia and Nixon’s perversion of secret leadership that would be the catapult for Rumsfeld and Cheney’s design on the presidency. The coming out of American culture, to Reaganism, Allende, Iran-contra and the secret coups, and the casualties of the culture war: two generations of gay men dead; leading to the stalking of a Democrat president whose supposed crimes paled in comparison to Republicans who came before, to the attack on 9.11 that led to the further crumbling that we can trust our government, though in the end we must… which led us back to foreign dangers of “urgent” threat and “mushroom clouds,” harking back to that time, only this time we were led by lies, warnings and threat levels that led us into a preemptive war in which we lost our national soul in a split second.
The memory of the way we were embodied in the image of a youthful, vigorous and valiant J.F.K. who, even though we now know was merely a mortal, someone deathly ill, with addictions and predilections, we still long to find again. Because he was a leader with passion, persistence and purpose, who when he spoke inspired us to close our eyes and imagine the impossible. Vision. A man who guided this nation at a time in history when war was the easy way out, but who instead found a way to preserve the peace.
Nothing was ever the same after J.F.K. died.
I am a Democrat forever changed by John F. Kennedy’s death by watching what he meant to American through my siblings’ eyes. I voted for WJC twice, Hillary in the primaries, and proudly Obama, looking for the 21st century Democrats to take us out of the wilderness and beyond the madness of man made miseries that a country led by smarter leaders intuitively knew would be our undoing.
Yet here we sit today mired by caution, stalled, time whittling away the power to do it all.
As we all still long to find again that place a wounded wife claimed as Camelot, but which, amidst the tales and the truth and the pain and the unanswered questions, is simply known as our country, that will forever be John F. Kennedy’s America, a place where we still endeavor to manifest our dreams.
Sources: The New York Times, Tom Wicker’s “Introduction to ‘Four Days in November’”; Washington Post; PBS’s Frontline; ABC News Special on the J.F.K. Assassination, with Peter Jennings; The Warren Commission Report; History Channel documentaries on “The Men Who Killed Kennedy”; “An Unfinished Life,” by Robert Dallek; among others, including Oliver Stone’s “J.F.K.” and Mark Lane’s work on the assassination of J.F.K., from so long ago, and Salon.com’s David Talbot; and “Weeping for J.F.K.,” by Taylor Marsh (based on decades of study, research and a life lived in the aftermath of J.F.K.’s murder.).
Adaptation and expansion of a previously printed article.
