Thirty years later, JFK's assassination lives on in memory

History, after all, is the memory of a nation.

--John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963

He moved west along Main Street in an open convertible, basking in the
late-autumn Dallas sunshine, smiling his movie-star smile and waving to the
cheering lunch-hour crowds. President John F. Kennedy had come to Texas to
reconcile feuding Democrats and make a speech at the Dallas Trade Mart.
Beside him sat his glamorous wife, Jacqueline. Ahead of them on the jump
seats were their hosts--Texas governor John Connally and his wife, Nellie.
At 12:29 p.m., the motorcade turned north off Main onto Houston Street.
Nellie Connally, raising her voice over the noise of the crowd and the
police motorcycles, said: ``Mr. President, you can't say Dallas doesn' t love
you.'' At 12:30 p.m., as the procession swung around Dealey Plaza towards
the Stemmons Freeway on-ramp, shots were fired from a sixth-floor window of
the nearby Texas School Book Depository. The president was hit and so was
Connally. A Secret Service agent flung himself protectively over the
slumping Kennedy and stayed there, sprawled on the convertible's rear deck,
as the motorcade sped to Parkland Memorial Hospital. There, Kennedy was
pronounced dead at 1 p.m.

Around the world, the news of America's fourth presidential assassination in
a century froze millions in disbelief and seemed almost to suspend reality.
Crowds stood vigil at U.S. embassies in Europe, Asia and Latin America. In
the United States and Canada, people in thousands of shops, factories and
offices quit working and gathered around radios and TV sets. Tears ran down
the face of CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite and viewers cried with him. Prime
Minister Lester Pearson offered condolences and prepared to join global
dignitaries in Washington for the funeral. The leader of the free world was
dead, Camelot had vanished in the crack of a rifle shot and, for a shaken
America, the grieving had only just begun. Ahead lay the murders of Bobby
Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the appalling torment of Vietnam, Kent
State, riots and burning cities.

For the Dallas police, there was no time for mourning. An hour and 15
minutes after Kennedy was pronounced dead, they barged into a movie theatre
showing War is Hell and arrested a luckless one-time defector to the Soviet
Union called Lee Harvey Oswald, wanted for the fatal shooting moments before
of patrolman J. D. Tippit. When police retraced Oswald's flight from the
book depository where he worked, they decided they had Kennedy's assassin as
well. But less than 48 hours later, Jack Ruby, a small-time hoodlum and
strip-club owner, shot and killed Oswald in the basement of Dallas City
Hall. Convicted and sentenced to death, Ruby died in jail of cancer. In
September, 1964, the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald, acting alone,
had killed both Kennedy and Tippit and had not known Ruby.

But as the years passed, millions of Americans grew profoundly skeptical.
Some 200 books, dozens of TV documentaries and the blockbuster 1991 movie
JFK have alleged conspiracies or coverups: Oswald was not the only shooter;
Oswald was a scapegoat; Oswald was in the pay of Cuba's Castro, the CIA, the
FBI, the Pentagon, the Mafia, the Soviets, left-wingers, right-wingers;
Oswald was not really Oswald but a shadowy somebody else; Ruby, who claimed
to be Jacqueline Kennedy's avenger, was really hired by the people who hired
Oswald and did not want him to testify. Repeated official denials and
rebuttals have not discouraged the conspiracy theorists or reduced public
fascination. The murder of John Kennedy has become America's greatest ever
whodunit, its origins preserved in the memories of those who were in Dallas
that fateful day.

By 10 a.m., hundreds of people had gathered along the chain-link security
fence at Love Field in a light rain, hoping to catch a glimpse of the
Kennedys. Moments before Air Force One came into view, the rain stopped and
as the plane landed, the sun came out.

``I still to this day remember Jackie getting off that plane,'' says Jim
Ewell, then The Dallas Morning News police reporter and now the public
relations spokesman for the Dallas County Sheriff's Department. ``Kennedy
went up to the fence, and I'm sure it was making the Secret Service nervous,
but the people were reaching over the fence to shake his hand, to touch him,
and he was reaching out to them.''

Shortly after the presidential motorcade left for downtown Dallas, Ewell was
on the freeway heading back to his office when Dallas Police Chief Jesse
Curry sped past in the opposite direction. ``Then, I saw the open Kennedy
limousine and I knew something was out of order because there was this man
stretched across the turtle deck.'' At police headquarters, a detective
hurried past him to a waiting patrol car. ``I said, `Gerry, what the hell's
going on?' His exact words were, `Some son of a bitch just shot Kennedy. ' I
jumped in the back seat and went with them.''

The schoolbook building was like a disturbed anthill, Ewell says in his flat
Texas drawl. ``There were squad cars and cops everywhere, cops still
training shotguns up at the windows. A few minutes later, Gerry leaned out
of the window on the sixth floor and said, `Well, we know what he had for
lunch--fried chicken.' You know what? All this time, I'm not sure just what
the hell I'm doing. I'm not taking any notes, I'm just kinda, you know, in a
twilight.''

When word came that a policeman had been shot in the city's Oak Cliff
district, Ewell joined police who were tracking his assailant. ``So I end up
in the Texas Theatre when they catch him. As I looked over the balcony
railing, it was at that moment that the cops reached Lee Harvey. When he
tried to shoot one of them, there was a scuffle and they fell between the
seats and the rest of the cops rushed up and piled in. I will always
remember that somebody was trying to poke the barrel of a shotgun down among
all the heads and arms and shoulders of those cops fighting Lee Harvey. ''

Henry Wade, former FBI agent and Second World War U.S. navy veteran, was
Dallas County district attorney from 1950 to 1987 and, by 1963, had
successfully prosecuted 25 murder cases. Now 79, he has been a widower for
six years, has switched from smoking tobacco to chewing it and is counsel to
a law firm in north Dallas. He was in the crowd awaiting Kennedy at the
Dallas Trade Mart when word came that the president and governor Connally, a
longtime friend, had been shot.

At about 5 p.m., he went to Parkland hospital where he sat for a time with
Nellie Connally while her husband underwent surgery. ``Then, I went home,''
Wade recalls, ``and shortly after, I got a call from Cliff Carter, who was a
right-hand man of [vice-president Lyndon] Johnson's and he said it' s come
over the television that y'all are going to claim the Russians conspired to
kill the president. I said I didn't know where that came from because as far
as I knew we had no evidence that there were any Russians involved. Johnson
apparently was hung up on that and was scared to death the Russians were
going to release the atomic bomb.''

At Carter's insistence, Wade drove to police headquarters at city hall to
meet Oswald. ``I asked him if he had a lawyer,'' Wade says. ``He said he did
and named a New York City lawyer prominent in the civil liberties movement
who called back and said that he did not know Oswald and had no intention of
representing him. Oswald was defiant. I asked him questions about where he
was at the time of the shooting. He answered practically everything with `I
want a lawyer' and `Police brutality.' ''

Henry Wade believes he could have won a conviction and that Oswald would
have been sentenced to death. But death, as it turned out, was imminent.

Jim Leavelle is 73 and comes from a village called Detroit in Red River
County, Texas. ``I think my wife married me because she thought I' d take her
to the big city,'' he chuckles. Their children grown and long gone, they
live beside Lake Ray Hubbard in the Dallas suburb of Garland. In 1963,
Leavelle was a Dallas police detective and on Sunday, Nov. 24, was about to
become one of the most widely recognized players in the assassination drama.

That morning, police were preparing to transfer Oswald from the city hall
police lockup to the better-equipped and more secure cells at the Dallas
County Courthouse across town. Chief Curry, angered by rumors that Oswald
had been beaten, was determined to move him publicly so that the TV cameras
would display him undamaged. Shortly after 11 a.m., Secret Service, FBI and
other law enforcement agents had finished questioning Oswald.

``He had two different sweaters there and he said he wanted the black one, a
pullover, so we let him put it on,'' Leavelle says. ``I put two sets of
handcuffs on him, one set on both his wrists and then I handcuffed his right
arm to my left. I was kind of kidding him. I said, `Well, Lee, if anybody
shoots at you, I hope they're as good a shot as you are.' He kind of
laughed, the only time I saw him smile or laugh when he was in custody. He
said, `Aw, ain't nobody going to shoot at me. You're just being overdramatic
or something.' I said, `Well, if anybody does shoot at you, you know what to
do.' And he said, `The captain said to follow you so I'll go wherever you
go.' I said, `In that case, you'll be on the ground pretty quick if anyone
starts shooting.' ''

Oswald and Leavelle, wearing a pale gray Stetson and his only Neiman Marcus
suit, rode the elevator from the third floor to the basement and walked
along a short corridor to the parking garage.

``All the floodlights from the TV cameras came on and we were blinded
momentarily, couldn't see a thing,'' Leavelle recalls. ``Out of the corner
of my eye, I saw Ruby standing there with a gun at his side. About that same
instant, he made two short steps and double-actioned that .38 into Oswald's
stomach. I had Oswald by the belt in addition to being handcuffed to him,
and I tried to jerk him behind me but all I succeeded in doing was turning
his body a little bit so that instead of hitting him dead centre, it hit him
about four inches to the left of the navel.''

Leavelle grabbed Ruby with his free hand and shoved him backward. Other
policemen seized both the gun and Ruby. An ambulance took Oswald to Parkland
hospital, where he was put in the same emergency operating room that had
received Kennedy, and Dr. Malcolm Perry, part of the team that had tried to
save the president, operated in vain on the accused assassin. At 1:07 p.m.,
Oswald was pronounced dead.

Leavelle had had enough of televised police work. The next day, Monday the
25th, he whisked Ruby from City Hall to the county courthouse without
telling even his lieutenant--``and he got huffy about that.''

Ruby was badly frightened. ``On the way down in the elevator,'' Leavelle
remembers, ``he was wanting to wear my hat and my coat and everything
because he was afraid somebody was going to shoot him. I said, `Jack, you
ain't worth killin', nobody's going to shoot you.' Then, I said, `In all the
years I've known you, you've never done anything to hurt the police, but you
didn't do us any favor on this.' And he said, `All I wanted to do was be a
hero.' He'd figured we'd charge him with murder but the grand jury would
say, `Jack, that's a bad thing you done shootin' Oswald, but since he needed
killin' anyhow, we going to excuse you this time but don't do it again. ' And
he could stand at the front door of his club and people would come from far
and wide to shake the hand of the man who shot the assassin.''

That same day, while kings, emperors and prime ministers bowed their heads
in homage to the memory of a murdered president at Arlington National
Cemetery near Washington, Lee Harvey Oswald was buried in Rose Hill Cemetery
at Arlington, Texas, between Dallas and Fort Worth. There were five
mourners--Oswald's wife, Marina, his brother Robert, his mother and his two
infant children. The Rev. Louis Saunders, secretary of the Fort Worth
District Council of Churches, says that he had called five different
clergymen to perform the service but all had made excuses. Saunders, who had
not conducted a funeral service in eight years, nervously recited scripture
from memory: ``The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want; he maketh me to
lie down in green pastures. . . .'' Now 84, retired and living in Dallas,
Saunders says that he eventually got more than 1,000 letters and postcards,
only one of them critical.

But Lee Harvey Oswald did not stay buried. In 1981, British author Michael
Eddowes, who had written a book contending that the body in the Arlington
grave was that of a Soviet spy, got a court order for exhumation. Fort Worth
funeral director Paul Groody, who had put Oswald into the ground 18 years
before, returned to dig him up.

Now 74, Groody says that he found somebody had been there ahead of him. The
steel-reinforced concrete vault containing the casket had been broken,
probably when it fell while being lifted from the grave, Groody surmises. In
any event, he delivered the body to the Baylor Medical Center in Dallas
where, two years later, a pathologist confirmed that the teeth were indeed
those of Lee Harvey Oswald.

However, says Groody, the body he collected from Parkland hospital in 1963
had undergone an autopsy that included a craniotomy--opening the skull.
``But when we dug him up,'' he says, ``I didn't see any evidence that the
skull had been autopsied.''

``You think the guy wasn't Oswald?''

``Yup, I'm kind of convinced of that.''

``So what did they do, replace the teeth?''

``Replaced the head. Somebody went in, changed heads and put the head of the
real Lee Harvey in there.''

``So who did you originally bury?''

``Some guy who was groomed to look like him, but remember, it's only a dumb
old undertaker talkin'.''

For years after Kennedy's murder, Dallas was reviled across America. Some
newspaper stories called it ``Murder City'' and dwelled on its crime and
violence and loony right-wing extremists. People from Dallas told tales of
being refused service in other cities if they mentioned where they were
from. ``You know what I think cured that?'' says Henry Wade. ``When they
killed Bobby Kennedy in Los Angeles and Martin Luther King in Memphis.
People began thinking, `Why, this can happen in any city.' ''

On the drive in from the airport, the city's soaring, sculpted skyline- -made
famous by the Dallas TV series--appears suddenly in the distance, like a
mirage on the north Texas plain. But it is more a colossal monument to
fading oil-fed prosperity than to progress--Dallas is a troubled community.
As happened in other big U.S. cities following desegregation, most of the
white population fled to the suburbs; in 100 square blocks of downtown,
there are, by and large, only office buildings and hotels. No shops, no
movie houses, no grocers, no department stores, only one apartment building.
``There's a lot of racial strife--more so, I would say, than in the late
Sixties,'' says Darwin Payne, a journalism professor at Southern Methodist
University in Dallas. ``There's a lot of fear about what's happening.
Dallas, for years, felt it was immune to all the problems of the big cities
of the East. But now, we have all the problems and I can't see a
turnaround.''

No matter where the future takes the 152-year-old city on the Trinity River,
it will never quite shake its past. In the history of high-level murder and
intrigue, Dealey Plaza has joined the senate steps of Caesar's Rome, the
Ford Theatre of Lincoln's Washington, the streets of Archduke Ferdinand' s
Sarajevo. And the tourists come to stare at the grassy knoll and the triple
underpass, to take pictures of the old Texas School Book Depository- -now the
Dallas County Administration Building.

On the sixth floor, there is a broadloomed museum called simply The Sixth
Floor. There are huge wall-mounted photographs of the Kennedys in
Washington, in Berlin, in Dallas, driving, waving, smiling. In the gloom,
people watch videos of the fateful motorcade, of the president's 1961
inaugural address (``Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you
can do for your country....''). The corner containing the window from which
Oswald is said to have fired the fatal shots has been boxed off behind
glass, and people stare at the original bare wooden floor inside.

Downstairs, a tasteful souvenir shop sells a huge assortment of books about
Kennedy and the assassination, plastic-wrapped front pages of 1963
newspapers, and audio and video tapes--JFK in Ireland; JFK: The Day the
Nation Cried; Camelot: The Kennedy Years.

Outside, there is a metal plaque on the front of the building that reads, in
part: ``On Nov. 22, 1963, the building gained national notoriety when Lee
Harvey Oswald allegedly shot and killed president John F. Kennedy from a
sixth-floor window as the presidential motorcade passed the site.' ' Over the
years, the word ``allegedly'' has been underlined by repeated gouging.

PHOTO: Kennedy with daughter Caroline (CANAPRESS)

PHOTO: In the motocade minutes before tragedy (REUTER/BETTMANN)

PHOTOS (3): In the film by amateur photographer Zapruder: the leader of the
free world was dead, Camelot had vanished in the crack of a rifle shot and,
for a shaken America, the grieving had only just begun

PHOTO: Johnson taking the oath of office (CANAPRESS)

PHOTO: The old Texas School Book Depository and its infamous window

PHOTO: Leavelle, then and now: `I saw Ruby standing there with a gun. About
then, he made two short steps and double-actioned that .38 into Oswald' s
stomach' (GREG SMITH/SABA)

PHOTO: Jackie today, a book editor in New York City (ALLEN-GAMMA
LIAISON/PONOPRESSE)

PHOTO: Son John, a lawyer, cycling with actress Daryl Hannah MARCEL
THOMAS/SIPA)

PHOTO: Daughter Caroline, a lawyer and mother of three, with husband Edwin
Schlossberg (TALESNICK/RETNA)

PHOTO: Jackie and her children on the Capitol steps the day of the funeral:
America's royal family (REUTER/BETTMANN)

~~~~~~~~

By Rae Corelli

Inset Article

AMERICA'S ENDURING MYSTERY: WAS OSWALD A LONE ASSASSIN?

Dateline: Washington, DC

The second-floor reading room at the U.S. National Archives in Washington is
crammed most days with conspiracy buffs, poring over papers that, in some
cases, consist of nothing more than newspaper clippings that the CIA
inexplicably stamped ``secret.'' There are 800,000 pages of documents in
all, including 120,000 from the CIA. Released in August in accordance with a
1992 act of Congress, they amount to the largest disclosure ever of material
related to the assassination of president John F. Kennedy; more papers are
still to be made public. Those released so far--yellowing, creased, often
dog-eared and contained in 1,053 cardboard file boxes--reveal much evidence
of official incompetence and coverups of wild schemes. But there is no
smoking gun--nothing that proves the Warren Commission wrong in its basic
assertion: that lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald killed the president.

Still, recent polls show that between 72 and 80 per cent of Americans
believe there was a conspiracy. The major arguments for that view:

One gunman fired three shots from a sixth-floor window of the Texas
School Book Depository. One missed the motorcade, the other two hit the
president. However, at almost the same instant that Kennedy was hit, so was
Texas governor John Connally, sitting in front of him. If Connally was
struck by a separate bullet, there had to be a second gunman and thus a
conspiracy. For one bullet to pass through Kennedy's neck, zigzag through
the car, hit Connally in the back, exit the front of his chest, smash
through his right wrist and come to rest in his left thigh, it had to change
course several times. It had to be a ``magic bullet.''

Autopsy notes were inexplicably destroyed almost immediately after
Kennedy's body was first examined. However, doctors and nurses testified to
the Warren Commission that they saw an exit-type wound in the back of the
president's head. Such a wound could only have been caused by a gunman
shooting from in front of the motorcade. That ties in with a frame from the
famous film, shot by amateur cameraman Abraham Zapruder, which shows the
president's head snapping backwards, as though being hit from the front. And
at least half a dozen serious witnesses say they heard a shot coming from
the grassy knoll ahead of the motorcade.

The Zapruder film indicates that all the shots were fired in less than
eight seconds. Oswald's Mannlicher-Carcano bolt-action rifle, fitted with a
telescopic sight, was hardly a precision, fast-action weapon. Whoever fired
it that day was an expert; most of the crack snipers brought in by the
Pentagon have failed to reproduce the feat. But in the U.S. marines, Oswald
was remembered as a poor shot, and friends who hunted with him say he was
mediocre.

The Warren Commission worked under such time pressure and bureaucratic
constraint that it was often sloppy. Chief Justice Earl Warren told his
colleagues that it was important to world peace that the American public not
believe that the Soviet Union or Cuba were involved. He was predisposed to
find a lone assassin.

On the other hand:

The most recent and thorough investigation of the ``magic bullet''
included a computerized reconstruction. Unlikely though it seems, the
investigation concluded that one bullet could indeed have passed through the
president and continued on to hit Connally.

In recent years, panels of doctors have examined the autopsy
photographs and X-rays of Kennedy's body. All but one of the doctors said
the shots came from the rear.

The Zapruder film, and still photographs taken at the time, have been
computer enhanced. They show the grassy knoll in detail. Not only is there
no sign of a second gunman, but many of the witnesses who claim to have been
on the knoll and heard shots coming from behind them were not where they
said they were.

Nearly all the conspiracy theories point to at least one more gunman
and a backup force of plotters and planners. And yet, in the 30 years since
the shooting, no one has produced proof that anyone other than Oswald was
involved. If there really had been a conspiracy, something would almost
certainly have leaked by now. Either Oswald acted alone, or it is the best
coverup in history.

PHOTO: Oswald: polls show that as many as 80 per cent of Americans believe
there was a conspiracy (REUTER/BETTMANN)

~~~~~~~~

By William Lowther

Copyright 1993 by Maclean's Magazine. Text may not be copied without the express written permission of Maclean's Magazine.

Corelli, Rae, An American tragedy.., Vol. 106, Maclean's, 11-22-1993, pp 44.