Ever since the age of seven, I’ve been obsessed with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It took place when I was three, and though I have no memory of hearing the news, the President’s murder, in Dallas, hung over my childhood with the vivid and riveting terror of a dream. On my parents’ bookshelf, there was a slender, crimson-jacketed pictorial account of November 22, 1963—fifty years ago next month—and the days that followed, by the photographers of the Associated Press, called “The Torch Is Passed.” I would sit by myself for what felt like hours and stare at the black-and-white stills—the roses in Jackie’s arms at Love Field; the open Presidential limousine gleaming in the sunlight; the waving, unknowing crowds; Kennedy’s smile in the images just before the first shot; Jackie’s face turning toward him as his fists jerk up to his throat; the black shoe hanging over the back of the seat as the limo speeds away toward the underpass.
This silent nightmare remains active down in the lower muck of my unconscious: a Zapruder film that never stops playing, in a continuous loop, but always carries the force of the first viewing. In Don DeLillo’s “Underworld,” a woman named Klara watches that film, the most famous home movie ever shot, in a private art installation in New York, where it is being screened in several rooms at different speeds, and she feels that it somehow exposes the workings of the mind:
The footage seemed to advance some argument about the nature of film itself…. She thought to wonder if this home movie was some crude living likeness of the mind’s own technology, the sort of death plot that runs in the mind, because it seemed so familiar, the footage did—it seemed a thing we might see, not see but know, a model of the nights when we are intimate with our own dying.
At seven, I had no strong feelings about Kennedy himself, and I still don’t. He was an attractive person and a better-than-average President. His extremely public murder was a shock from which the country never recovered. But my connection with it has nothing to do with the usual story of generational idealism and disillusionment. Nor am I interested in the apparently inextinguishable question of a conspiracy. I’ve always assumed that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone—not because I’m steeped in millions of pieces of evidence but because the randomness of a lone gunman fits my primal sense of the assassination as its own self-contained event, mythic, without reference to anything outside itself, entirely confined within Dealey Plaza, taking exactly the 26.6 seconds of Abraham Zapruder’s color-saturated 8-mm. Bell & Howell Zoomatic footage. It has to happen, it’s foreordained to happen, you can’t believe that it will happen, that it is happening. The public drama of history and the private encounter with death: those were the discoveries that kept me staring at the pages of that book.
Last month, I went to Dallas for the first time. Dealey Plaza was at the top of my to-see list—really, the only thing on the list. It’s very small: everything is within a couple of hundred feet, giving it the feel of a stage or a set in the flat Texas light. Unlike every other much documented place I’ve visited, Dealey Plaza was exactly as I had imagined. It still looks as it did in those pictures from 1963: the old brick high-rises of downtown Dallas, the acute turn off Houston Street onto Elm that slows traffic, the flat open lawn on the left and the shaded grassy rise on the right, the concrete pedestal where Zapruder stood with his camera, the downward slope away toward the railroad underpass. There, looming over the whole scene, is the former Texas School Book Depository Building—the sixth-floor corner window looking almost directly down at Elm Street—so close that you think not that Oswald had to have been an extraordinary shot but that he could hardly have missed. It was like entering the landscape of a recurring dream whose every contour I already knew by heart but had to examine in minute detail for the first time. I must have spent two hours in Dealey Plaza.
Dallas never figured out what to do with the Kennedy assassination: the site is visibly torn between the duty to commemorate and the desire to move away. At the foot of the grassy knoll, just down the slope from Zapruder’s pedestal, a bronze plaque designates Dealey Plaza a National Historic Landmark. Directly even with the plaque, out in the middle lane of Elm Street, a large X, painted white, marks the point where the fatal second bullet struck Kennedy’s head. The impact of the earlier bullet is similarly marked a few dozen feet up the street. Normal traffic drives over the two X’s all day long. On the top floors of the School Book Depository, there’s a museum dedicated to the assassination and to the Kennedy Presidency. Oswald’s perch is re-created, down to the wall of boxes that he stacked up to conceal himself, but his corner of the sixth floor is glassed in, so that visitors can’t look out the window to see what Oswald saw.
My hosts in Dallas seemed unsurprised but unhappy about my interest in Dealey Plaza. They suggested that it might be better not to mention it at the talk I had come to give. As the city prepares to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination, with a coming flood of visitors and media people, the shame of the President’s murder is starting to throb again. Unfair as it might be, to some Americans Dallas is the assassination, the city that killed the President—a view that will surely be enhanced by the publication of “Dallas 1963,” by Bill Minutaglio, a former Dallas Morning News writer, and Steven L. Davis (also discussed by Adam Gopnik last week).
The authors describe the potent brew of right-wing passions, much of it well organized and well funded—Bircher anti-Communism, anti-Catholicism, racism (Dallas was the last large American city to desegregate its schools), Kennedy hatred—that suffused many people in Dallas with the spirit of dissension and incipient violence during the early sixties, including some of its leading citizens: elected officials, Baptist ministers, the billionaire oilman H. L. Hunt, the right-wing zealot General Edwin Walker, even the publisher of the Morning News, Ted Dealey. During the 1960 Presidential campaign, Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, the state’s most powerful politician, and his wife, Lady Bird, were spat upon in Dallas; Adlai Stevenson, J.F.K.’s Ambassador to the United Nations, was assaulted there just a month before the assassination. “WELCOME MR. KENNEDY TO DALLAS …,” ran the headline of a black-bordered, full-page ad in the Morning News on the morning of November 22, 1963, with a bill of particulars that stopped just short of accusing the President of treason. Kennedy had warned his wife, “We’re heading into nut country.”
Oswald was an avowed Marxist, which might seem to absolve the city’s right wing of any responsibility. But “Dallas 1963” places the assassin in context as a malleable, unstable figure breathing the city’s extraordinarily feverish air. Judge Sarah T. Hughes, who administered the oath of office to Johnson aboard Air Force One at Love Field, later said, “It could have happened anywhere, but Dallas, I’m sorry to say, has been conditioned by many people who have hate in their hearts and who seem to want to destroy.”
Last week, as part of the anniversary build up, the Morning News ran a brutally honest article about the city fifty years ago. The piece quotes Darwin Payne, a historian and former Dallas newspaperman: “You could feel it in the air. When I hear some people express hatred for Obama, it feels the same. But I never have felt we are on the verge of anything like the events I witnessed back then.”
American politics today isn’t haunted by the same fear of sudden, shattering violence. But, as for nut country, it’s migrated from the John Birch Society bookstores to the halls of Congress, where angry talk of socialism and impeachment is almost routine. Senator Ted Cruz and Representative Louie Gohmert are the spiritual descendants of Walker and Hunt. Fifty years later, Dallas would like to move on from Dealey Plaza. This is normal and right. What’s holding it back is the Republican Party.
Photograph: AP
