The assassination of John F. Kennedy, 50 years ago Friday, is the first political memory for those of us born in the first half of the baby boom.
That it remains seared in the mind is a testament to the lasting legacy of that moment. It was our 9/11.
I always knew I would one day visit Dealey Plaza in Dallas. Doing so for the first time this month on the 50th anniversary of the assassination brought so many things full circle.
North Ward Elementary School stood on Douglas Street where the Times Colonist building now stands. I wasn’t far from where I write today when an ashen-faced Miss McGill, my Grade 2 teacher, informed the class that all students were to be quickly ushered into the school’s assembly annex.
How is it that one can still recall such shards of memory? The principal, Mr. James, informed the students that the president of the United States had just been shot and killed and that school was cancelled for the day and we were all to go home and reflect. I vividly recall looking out the annex window and seeing the janitor lowering the Red Ensign to half mast on the central tower of that magnificent old red brick building that was North Ward Elementary.
I have no idea if I had even heard of Kennedy before that day, but probably had through fleeting glimpses of the Victoria Daily Times newspaper to which our family subscribed (back then in Victoria you were either a Times family or a Colonist family, and the difference mattered) or on flickering black-and-white images on the nightly TV newscasts.
But I will never forget the impact the death had on the adults around me — parents, uncles, teachers. Maybe it was because Kennedy was the first president who was of their generation, and whose young children Caroline and John Jr. would have been the age of their children or students — my age.
Kennedy was the first modern president in the true sense of the word “modern.” As significant as his predecessor Dwight D. Eisenhower was to world history, particularly during the Second World War, he was of yesterday’s generation born in the 1800s. Kennedy, the first president born in the 20th century, came of age in the Second World War but was forged in his political career by nuclear weapons, the Cold War, Sputnik and his promise to land a man on the moon.
In a flash, all that youthful promise seemed so cruelly stolen. Camelot lay in ruins. The 1960s and early-to-mid-1970s might have still gone off kilter — to this day I can’t listen to the sound of helicopters without thinking of the Vietnam War broadcast on the nightly newscasts throughout my years at S.J. Willis Junior High and Vic High — but it’s a popular notion it all began to unravel on Nov. 22, 1963.
I don’t know why so many, myself included, became conspiracy buffs unwilling or unable to accept the official Warren Commission verdict. Armchair psychologists believe it was too much for some people to comprehend that a single assassin could have wreaked such historical havoc — that something more monumental must have been afoot. Maybe the armchair psychologists are right. Perhaps by endlessly parsing the moment those shots rang out, and looking for a larger motive, it keeps the moment alive and relevant for so many.
The author William Manchester wrote: “Those who desperately want to believe President Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy have my sympathy. I share their yearning. If you put the murdered president of the United States on one side of a scale and that wretched waif Oswald on the other side, it doesn’t balance. You want to add something weightier to Oswald.”
Yet doubts persist, including those expressed recently by current U.S. secretary of state and 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry.
Meanwhile, I don’t believe 9/11 was an inside job perpetrated by George W. Bush, the moon landings were hoaxed on a sound stage in the Arizona desert or that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim born in Kenya but that his parents and grandparents were so far-sighted as to place birth announcements in the two Honolulu newspapers in 1961 on the remote off-chance that he might one day run for president of the United States.
But I remain open to the possibility there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. The popular tide has swung heavily to favour the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I have moved from outright rejection of that official line to being on the fence.
It was in the early 1970s that I stumbled across the late Sylvia Meagher’s landmark 1967 book Accessories After The Fact in the old Victoria main library in the Carnegie Building on Yates Street. Strange that I would still vividly remember that day, but it turned into one of those rare, head-spinning reads that stays with you a lifetime. It was early afternoon when I picked up the volume, and it was closing time at night by the time I put it down. So engrossed was I in the inconsistencies of the official Warren Commission account of the assassination, which Meagher meticulously laid bare, that I had literally lost track of time. I was hooked, having since spent countless dollars on every manner of book on the subject — both conspiracy- and lone nut-angled. My bookshelves at home are creaking under their weight. Now, of course, all you have to do is Google “JFK” and you can have your fill of it.
I’m not one of those amateurs who does original assassination research or joins groups who discuss their theories. Although I feel this story has touched my life, I’m not that nutty. That said, I have perhaps rather amusingly become the Times Colonist’s go-to guy on the subject — having also written articles on the assassination for the paper on the 35th anniversary in 1998 and 40th anniversary in 2003. Sometimes, even sports writers need to wander further afield.
My opinion is just that, but everything points to Oswald being involved in some way. But was it, as he so famously stated after his arrest, as “a patsy,” or discontented loner gunman?
Clearly, Oswald was no ordinary nobody. A former Marine and one of the few people to defect to the Soviet Union from a Western democracy during the height of the Cold War — only to return to the U.S. with a Soviet bride — he would have been all over the CIA and FBI briefing books of the time. But were they just watching him, or was he being actively handled by intelligence agencies or perhaps the mob, the latter whose simmering resentment and anger against Kennedy was nearing boiling point?
An average to poor shot in the Marines, Oswald pulled off one of the great — and grisly — feats of shooting history with an out-of-date, Italian-made, manual bolt-action rifle fired from an unusual rear angle from a sixth storey.
Even a Seinfeld episode parodied the near physics-defying magic-bullet theory, the latter being the only explanation that makes it possible for Oswald to have done what he is accused of doing.
So it is no surprise to come to Dallas this month and find that so many visitors to Dealey Plaza inevitably gravitate behind the picket fence — rebuilt several times since 1963 — atop the grassy knoll, where many of the eyewitnesses ran that day and where conspiracy theorists speculate the second or third gunman stood firing the fatal and famous shot that jolted Kennedy’s head backward.
The back of the picket fence has become a sort of message board written on by people from around the world. Some of the scribblings:
“RIP JFK.”
“Seek truth at all costs.”
“Oswald acted alone. Let JFK RIP.”
“A professional black ops hit all the way. Rogue elements in your government ... shot right from here.”
Many of the scrawlers have signed their names.
“This is where a president lost his life and this is where a nation lost its mind,” wrote Ben Landis on one of the back fence panels.
“Read everything. Listen to everything. Don’t believe anything unless you can prove it. Do your own research,” scrawled Milton W. Cooper.
That kid who was in Grade 2 that day at North Ward Elementary in far-off Victoria, B.C., simply wrote his name “Cleve” on the fence this month. I didn’t add a comment. Strange for a writer, but I could think of nothing to say. I just walked the railway area behind the fence for hours, wondering. What did switchman Lee Bowers see from that railway tower, which still stands in the parking lot behind the picket fence, when he described “a flash of light or smoke?” And why did Bowers end up dead, like so many of the witnesses, within three years after the assassination?
I had never been there before, but felt I knew every inch of Dealey Plaza.
It is very quiet and respectful, but you are never alone in the compact plaza, which was one of many Depression-era public works projects initiated by another iconic Democratic president who is also instantaneously recognizable by just three initials — FDR. There are always people milling about Dealey Plaza, especially in the month of the 50th anniversary of the assassination. They all stare and contemplate, some holding out fingers as they point to key landmarks such as the Triple Underpass under which Kennedy’s limo sped on the way to Parkland Hospital after he had been hit. Many of these people milling about have opinions. Some of them even come armed with what they claim is evidence.
Mark Oakes had set up a table in Dealey Plaza, complete with a video machine, when I was there earlier this month. He showed film shot during the assassination by a woman named Patsy Paschall purporting to show “flashes” from behind the picket fence at the exact moment the shots rang out. The film, not as famous as Abraham Zapruder’s from that day but remarkable in its own right, was shot 50 years ago by Paschall from across Dealey Plaza, aimed in the direction of the grassy knoll. There might be something there but it’s grainy and hard to tell. You could say that for so much of the evidence from that day.
“No one will show this. They [officialdom and the mainstream media] are afraid of her [Paschall],” said Oakes, a historian, producer and veteran JFK assassination researcher, to anyone who would listen.
It was time to bid farewell to Oakes and head to the sixth floor of what is now the Dallas County Administration Building, but in 1963 was the Texas School Book Depository — words that still jangle in the brain if you are of a certain generation. There in what is now the Sixth Floor Museum awaits the official story. I also stood there for hours staring at the far sixth-floor window — preserved as it appeared on Nov. 22, 1963, and cordoned by a Plexiglas barrier — from which the Warren Commission said a 24-year-old malcontent loner named Lee Harvey Oswald fired all the shots that killed JFK.
There is little doubt Oswald, an employee in the depository building, was perched in that window that day behind a stack of brown book boxes. It makes that little corner so eerie and compelling that you are almost forced to gulp upon seeing it for the first time. But in what capacity Oswald was there — as lone nut or chess piece in a wider game — remains the question for many.
When you are actually on the sixth floor of the building, looking down to the plaza roads below, the obvious question hits you like, well, a stack of Texas school books. Why did Oswald not shoot JFK when he would have had a clear and direct frontal head shot on Houston Street before the presidential motorcade turned left onto Elm Street? Why did he wait for the more difficult shot from the rear after Kennedy’s open-top limo had turned onto Elm? As conspiracy theorists love to point out, Elm Street provided the perfect opportunity for a clear, frontal shot from behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll.
In the official version of events, Oswald did the deed and left the scene of the crime and made his way to his boarding house in the Oak Cliff area of Dallas. I might have been working on an arithmetic or spelling assignment for Miss McGill when Oswald left his boarding house. Purportedly acting suspiciously while walking along a quiet residential street, he was confronted by Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit, whom Oswald shot to death before being captured at the nearby Texas Theatre.
Making your way through Oak Cliff — to Oswald’s boarding house, the Tippit murder scene and the still-operating Texas Theatre — is a Twilight Zone-like experience. That’s because this area — unlike the rest of sleek and ultra-modern Dallas — seems stuck in time and little changed from 1963. To get the idea, think of that little commercial row on Burnside Road between Harriet and Tillicum, the little strip businesses along Haultain or the Roxy Theatre on Quadra. There has been little, if any, gentrification or rebuilding. It almost seems as if Oak Cliff is preserved in amber, perpetually reliving Nov. 22, 1963.
The people who own the Oswald boarding house have a sign on the front lawn advertising that they will let you in, at an admission cost, to see Oswald’s old room. I was tempted but passed on that. (I did, perhaps, show poor form by standing on the X that marks the spot where the fatal head shot occurred back on Elm Street, although a lot of people do it).
I found this bucket-list — I hate that term but here I go using it — excursion to Dealey Plaza oddly draining emotionally. From Douglas Street in Grade 2 to Elm Street 50 years later, it has been a long, personal journey. And not just for me, but for many of my generation. Maybe some day we’ll get our answers.
Most say we already have them and they point solely to the sixth-floor window. Others continue to wonder if it is really that simple and keep looking for ghosts behind the picket fence for their answers. Fifty years on, speculating about the JFK assassination remains the greatest parlour game in history.
Cleve Dheensaw has been a Times Colonist sports writer for 32 years.