The Talk of the Town
The New Yorker, 7 December 1963
Notes and Comment
It was as if we slept from Friday to Monday and dreamed an oppressive,
unsearchably significant dream, which, we discovered on awaking, millions of
others had dreamed also. Furniture, family, the streets, and the sky dissolved;
only the dream on television was real. The faces of the world's great mingled
with the faces of landladies who had happened to house an unhappy ex-Marine;
cathedrals alternated with warehouses, temples of government with suburban
garages; anonymous men tugged at a casket in a glaring airport; a murder was
committed before our eyes; a Dallas strip-tease artist drawled amiably of her
employer's quick temper; the heads of state of the Western world strode down a
sunlit street like a grim village rabble; and Jacqueline Kennedy became
Persephone, the Queen of Hades and the beautiful bride of grief. All human
possibilities, of magnificence and courage, of meanness and confusion, seemed to
find an image in this long montage, and a stack of cardboard boxes in Dallas, a
tawdry movie house, a tiny rented room where some shaving cream still clung to
the underside of a washbasin, a row of parking meters that had witnessed a
panicked flight all acquired the opaque and dreadful importance that innocent
objects acquire in nightmares.
What did it mean? Can we hope for a meaning? "It's the fashion to hate
people in the United States." This quotation might be from one of a hundred
admonitory sermons delivered after President Kennedy's death. In actuality, it
occurs in an interview granted in 1959 to a United Press reporter, Aline Mosby,
by a young American defector then living in Moscow, Lee Harvey Oswald. The
presumed assassin did not seem to be a violent man. "He was too quiet, too
reserved," his ex-landlord told reporters. "He certainly had the
intelligence and he looked like he could be efficient at doing almost
anything." In his room, the police found a map on which was marked the
precise path that three bullets in fact took. The mind that might have unlocked
this puzzle of perfectly aimed, perfectly aimless murder has been itself forever
sealed by murder. The second assassination augmented the first, expanded our
sense of floating on a dark sea of potential violence. In these cruel events,
democracy seemed caricatured; a gun voted, and a drab Dallas neighborhood was
hoisted into history. None of our country's four slain Presidents were victims
of any distinct idea of opposition or hope of gain; they were sacrificed,
rather, to the blind tides of criminality and insanity that make civilization
precarious. Between Friday and Monday, three men died: a President, a policeman,
and a prisoner. May their deaths be symbols, clues to our deep unease, and omens
we heed.
The dream began to lift at the sight, on television, of President Johnson
giving his broad and friendly handshake, with exquisite modulations of political
warmth, to the line of foreign dignitaries who had come to Washington as
mourners. Reality was knitting itself together. The sanity of daylight has
returned, but the dissipated dream should not be forgotten; it must be memorized
and analyzed. We pray that we do not fall into such a sleep again.
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