The JFK Assassination - 50 Years Later

I was a few months past 11 years old on November 22, 1963, when I and classmates returned to school after a short recess and witnessed the stunned shock and disbelief of the teachers and school staff to the news that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated.  The shock extended to everyone we knew and over the following days people remained glued to their televisions watching the unfolding drama of a nation in mourning and the president's funeral.  A doubt few who lived through those days will forget the experience. Now, it's 50 years later and I still vividly recall that November day and the events that followed.  A piece in the Washington Post revisits the scene of the crime, if you will, and the Texas School Book Depository - now a museum that a dear friend and historian here in Hampton, Virginia helped create.  Here are highlights:

DALLAS — Dealey Plaza is a depression. It’s a shallow basin on the western edge of downtown, framed by concrete structures called pergolas and peristyles that were built by the Works Progress Administration. Designed as a gateway to the city, the plaza is more of an ode to the automobile, because the broad lawn is sliced by three streets: Elm, Main and Commerce. They slope from east to west and converge beneath a rail line in what is known as the triple underpass.

That’s where President and Mrs. Kennedy were headed, on Elm, when the ghastly thing happened.

On the north side of the plaza is the famous grassy knoll, where the second shooter supposedly lurked. There’s actually a second grassy knoll on the south side of the plaza. And the grassy knolls aren’t actually knolls (as in, a hillock, a mound), but rather are just slopes on the rim of the plaza.
The place hasn’t changed much since Nov. 22, 1963. Some signage is different. Skyscrapers loom in the distance. The live oaks are bigger. Otherwise, it’s remarkably preserved, including the building on the northeast corner of the plaza, which in 1963 was a warehouse known as the Texas School Book Depository. Up there, behind a pile of boxes in the southeast corner of the sixth floor, Lee Harvey Oswald pulled the trigger.

“It’s smaller than I thought it would be,” Kimberly Feare, 52, of Redwood City, Calif., said of Deal­ey Plaza on a recent Saturday afternoon. “But maybe it’s dwarfed by the incident itself. It’s such a huge thing.”

There, off the cuff, from a tourist, is the central tension of the Kennedy assassination.  This was, as she noted, a huge thing, a moment routinely and almost numbingly cited as an end to our innocence, as the termination of postwar conformism and the beginning of the chaos and madness and rage of the 1960s. It killed the first television president, his death captured on film. The assassination has been, ever since, the subject of obsessive investigation. There is always more to learn, always another factoid to gnaw.

The conspiracy theorists have one advantage: They don’t have to have all the answers, merely enough questions and doubts to shatter the mainstream consensus. The Lone Nut orthodoxy is essentially a closed narrative — it all but says “Keep moving folks, nothing to see here” — while the conspiracy theories are self-sustainingly open-ended, branching infinitely, a perpetual-motion mystery that will be with us forever.

And they do one more thing: They bequeath the assassination a deeper layer of meaning. This is an institutional murder. The bad guys are powerful people in the shadows of our civilization. This is not some small event — it’s an epic struggle between enlightenment and evil.

For many of us, what we see at Dealey Plaza says a lot about who we are. It reflects a worldview. It reveals how we process information. It even becomes part of our identity, like party affiliation or religious belief. And thus, as we study the facts, and scrutinize the images, and examine all the angles and trajectories, we are vulnerable to confirmation bias. Believing is seeing.