But no one thinks of that today, when they think of Dealey Plaza. For it was on this tiny parcel of land that the 35th President of the United States was shot to death in 1963.
The murder of President Kennedy is so inextricably linked to Dealey Plaza that the area's aesthetic charms are often overlooked. But its charms are considerable. It is a symmetrical design, with Main Street, running east to west, serving as its center, like the hingepoint of a Rorschach test.
The remaining streets of Dealey Plaza form the shape of a bell, or a halved Hershey's kiss. The sides of this bell are the graceful curves of Commerce and Elm, which taper from its wide end at Houston to its narrow end at a railroad bridge. Commerce and Elm converge with Main and together lead under the bridge, at a spot known as the Triple Underpass.
On the north and south sides of the Plaza are grassy slopes, each topped by concrete pergolas --- open, roofless monuments supported by columns. To the west of the pergolas are wooden fences, which extend all the way to the Triple Underpass. It is from behind the fence on the northern slope --- the one above Elm Street --- that many people believe shots were fired at the Presidential motorcade on November 22, 1963.
Because of a crime committed thirty years ago, tourists flock to Dealey Plaza. On any day, at almost any hour, the curious may be seen walking around the northern slope, known to history as the grassy knoll. They walk to the parking lot behind the fence, where suspicious activity was observed shortly before the ambush; stand on the pergola where Abraham Zapruder filmed his famous home movie; and stroll up and down Elm Street, where JFK was hit. From other vantage points, they also stare up at the former Texas School Book Depository --- and perhaps imagine, at a sixth floor corner window, a demented young man aiming a rifle.
Shortly before the thirtieth anniversary of the assassination, and seventeen years after it first occurred to me that perhaps the official version of events was not to be believed, I walked through Dealey Plaza for the very first time. By then I probably knew the area better than most Dallasites, through the writings of assassination critics and the study of photographs and diagrams. But I was not prepared for the effect it would have on me.
There is Dealey Plaza, the place --- that bell-shaped configuration of streets. And there is Dealey Plaza, the idea --- the violent death of a chief executive, in what many believe was a coup d'état, a cabal conceived by his political opponents.
As I walked down Houston Street for the first time, seeing so much that was so familiar, countless viewings of the Zapruder film replayed in my head. Again I could see, vividly, the hideous moments of JFK's destruction --- the most intensely studied few moments, it is said, of our time. I was overwhelmed with emotion and felt the need to sit down.
Such is the power of the idea.
I had arrived in Dallas earlier that afternoon. It was a warm October Thursday. The Dallas Fort Worth airport was much bigger than I expected, a sprawling place that is larger than some cities.
After retrieving my luggage I made my way to a bus that would shuttle me to one of a string of car rental agencies, located somewhere in that vast facility. I threw my stuff onto a rack and sat down. A few businessman types got on after me.
The bus pulled out into traffic. The driver said:
"Well, we ain't goin' to no rental agencies, folks, y'all can forget about that right now. We're goin' down Old Mexico way. Next stop Mexico City." I could see his good-natured smile in the large rear-view mirror up above him. "Anybody mind?"
The businessmen were young guys, and they all laughed approvingly; I joined in.
"After that, it's Puerto Vallarta for a dip in the ocean. We're gonna need that swim, too, cuz if you think it's hot in Texas, just wait, it ain't nuthin' compared to Mexico hot." The driver looked back at the passengers in his rear view mirror. "Okay, I know what you're all thinking: Shut up and drive the bus!"
Before long we were cruising down an exit ramp, where we passed a motorcycle cop writing a ticket to some hapless motorist. The driver couldn't contain himself. "Look out, the cops got Harleys now. Drive with care."
Finally, we reached the rental agencies. "Here we are, folks --- Avis, Budget, Hertz, National..."
What about Alamo?
It was then I learned that Alamo had its own shuttle, and was located some distance away from the other agencies. I'd been on the wrong bus. I would have to return to the airport terminal and wait for the right one to come along.
But soon everything was straightened out and I was climbing into a bright blue Chevrolet Cavalier. After some more bumbling around I found my motel and checked in. Then I made my way downtown.
In the aftermath of the assassination, a group of citizens in Dallas raised money to pay for the construction of a memorial to the slain President. The resulting cenotaph is located several blocks from Dealey Plaza, at the corner of Market and Commerce Streets. Four immense concrete walls, open on two sides, enclose a single, flat granite slab, which bears only the name, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
It struck me as proper to see this memorial before anything else. I arrived lugging a heavy camera bag and a backpack containing a notebook and several maps.
The memorial is intended to be a place of quiet meditation, and for this reason it is open at the top. Let your thoughts and prayers fly up to the heavens. Street sounds prevented any real meditating, but I sat on the granite slab and reflected for a moment on what John F. Kennedy meant to me.
His assassination is my earliest really clear memory in life. I was in second grade at Columbia Elementary School in Peoria, Illinois. I had just returned from lunch at home when the terrible news arrived. At first it was a rumor among the kids milling around outside. But once we were back in class, the hushed voice of the school principal announced the president's death over a public address system.
From the JFK memorial I walked the several blocks to Dealey Plaza, and experienced the powerful emotion of seeing the place for the very first time --- a case of sensory overload.
But that passed fairly quickly, and soon I was focusing on the scene of the crime. This was the reason I was in Dallas to begin with. I stood at the corner of Main and Houston, where the presidential motorcade first entered Dealey Plaza, and took a couple of pictures of the Dallas County Administration Building --- formerly the Texas School Book Depository, from where two official investigations concluded Lee Harvey Oswald fired three rounds, scoring two hits.
Then I made my way around the grassy islands in the plaza's center, where workers were digging long, shallow trenches. Tiny red flags were implanted in the grass.
It was about this time that I noticed the first of several people who were working on the grassy knoll selling newsletters --- part of a cottage industry spawned by the assassination. This may be seen as the heroic work of private researchers struggling to counter the official version of events, or as callous commercialization by assassination scavengers.
A handful of people were selling at least five different newsletters that day. Some wandered the sidewalks with canvas newspaper bags strapped around their waists. Others stationed themselves to one spot and waited for customers to pass by.
Perhaps the most ambitious was a man offering a free videotape with a six-month subscription to his self-published newsletter. He was operating out of an enclosed area on the concrete pergola above Elm Street; a noisy generator powered a VCR that played the video. He had also set up an elaborate display featuring computer-enhanced details of assassination photographs, purporting to reveal gunmen in the shadows of the knoll.
The first person I spoke with was a young man named Steve Jameson. He was up on the concrete pergola selling a newsletter called The Kennedy Quarterly.
"How much?" I asked.
"Three dollars."
I was a little suspicious, so we talked some more. The Kennedy Quarterly, Steve said, was published and largely written by his father Mike Jameson, a Dallas resident who had devoted many years to researching the case.
"What does he think of the Warren Report?"
"Well --- basically that it's the biggest piece of crap ever published."
I paid Steve the three bucks and retired to a spot on the pergola to look the newsletter over. I had assumed I was buying a sensationalized rag from someone catering to the tourist crowd, and to some extent this was correct. Headlines included: "History Was Made And YOU Are There!"..."Oliver Stone Loves Our SIXTY Assassination Theories," and "How I Solved the Kennedy Assassinaton," this last a humorous piece by the irrepressible Joe Bob Briggs.
The Kennedy Quarterly included some genuinely interesting stuff, too. There was an excerpt from former Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry's 1969 book JFK Assassination File, long out of print. And there was a shocking picture I hadn't seen before: a post-mortem photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald laid out on a gurney, the awful wound inflicted by Jack Ruby plain to see.
But a closer reading of the newsletter would have to wait. I slipped it back into its cover and resumed my tour of the grassy knoll.
I walked around behind the fence adjacent to the pergola. This is the place from where many believe the fatal head shot was fired, and eyewitness testimony supports that theory. Lee Bowers, from a position in a railroad switching tower behind the fence, observed several men in this area moments before the shooting; his testimony before the Warren Commission was ignored. And many witnesses reported hearing gunshots from back here; several police officers, converging on the grassy slope just after the shots were fired, said that hysterical witnesses indicated shots had come from behind the fence.
To my untrained eye, a position behind this fence provided an ideal assassin's lair. There is ample cover from trees and bushes. And Elm Street, where the motorcade passed, is at most one hundred feet away. As former CIA man John Stockwell has noted, "This is pistol range."
Supporters of the Warren Commission findings scoff at the notion of a shooter from behind the fence. They say no physical evidence of a gunman there was ever found. But what would you expect from a professional hit? A calling card? A smoking gun?
As it happens, however, there was physical evidence --- indeed, there had been a smoking gun. Several railroad employees, watching the presidential motorcade from atop the Triple Underpass, heard shots and saw gunsmoke coming from the area behind the fence. Two of them ran around to where the smoke came from and found several cops already there. The railroad men poked around, and as one later recalled, found a car backed up to the fence. S.M. Holland said there was mud on the vehicle, as if "someone had...stood up on the bumper to see over the fence." A similar account was offered by railroad employee James Simmons.
The most powerful indication of a shot originating from behind the fence is probably the Zapruder film. There is a wrenching moment when JFK's head explodes in a gory red plume --- then snaps back and to the left, clearly a reaction to a shot fired from the right front.
The Warren Commission, of course, concluded that the only shots fired in Dealey Plaza that day came from a sixth floor corner window of the Texas School Book Depository. Lee Harvey Oswald, they said, fired three shots at the motorcade --- killing Kennedy, wounding John Connally, and slightly wounding bystander James Tague. The President's backward-and-to-the-left movement seen in the Zapruder film is not explained by the Commission, although others have since argued it was a neuro-muscular reaction to having his head blown off --- sort of a death spasm, I guess.
The Depository is a squat, rather plain building. Today it houses an assassination museum called The Sixth Floor, which opened in 1989. I was saving a trip to this museum for Saturday, two days hence.
I walked down Houston Street, where there are reflecting pools, empty at present, along the sidewalk. It was from a position by one of these pools that a man named Howard Brennan claimed he saw Oswald and his rifle in a sixth floor Depository window.
Brennan became a star witness for the Warren Commission, even though his identification of Oswald was, it can be fairly argued, tainted. The Commission considered Brennan's identification probative, even though he admitted having seen Oswald's picture on television twice before he viewed him in a police lineup.
A woman wearing a neckbrace approached me. A canvas newspaper bag was strapped around her waist, and she held a newsletter aloft: "Would you like to buy one of these?"
"Thanks, but I already got one."
"You didn't buy it from that guy with long hair, did you?"
Steve Jameson was a longhair, all right. "Well --- yeah."
"Well then you didn't buy anything worth anything." She showed me the newsletter she was selling: JFK Today. "This is the paper you want." On its cover was a large uncropped print of the Altgens photograph --- a controversial snapshot that might show Oswald, weaponless, at the moment the assassination began.
So I said I'd buy it. First I took the woman's picture.
"What's your name?"
"Doris."
"Doris what?" I asked, fiddling with the camera's f-stop.
"Doris Crawford."
I snapped the photograph. "How'd you hurt your neck?"
"Oh, it was pretty bad," she replied. "An eighteen-wheeler hit my car a couple of months ago. The driver fell asleep at the wheel."
JFK Today sold for three dollars, and I forked it over. I was glad to add it to my collection of assassination stuff, but the claim that it was a superior product was quickly exposed as a marketing ploy. JFK Today consisted mostly of photographs --- and most of these had, over the years, been published widely, and with greater clarity.
But there was one I hadn't seen before, and though it is incidental to virtually every aspect of the assassination, I found it striking. Clint Hill is shown receiving a commendation from an unnamed Treasury Department official, as the widowed Jacqueline Kennedy and others look on.
Hill was the Secret Service agent who leaped onto the rear of the presidential limousine just after the fatal head shot. There is a certain poignancy to this photograph, seen in the pained expression on Hill's face --- a helpless look suggesting he would give anything to undo the events resulting in his commendation.
It seemed as if assassination was in the very air.
As I drove back to the motel after my first afternoon in Dealey Plaza, news came over the radio that Guy Malary, the Haitian justice minister, had been machine-gunned to death earlier that day. He had been in office for just two months.
The following day, the Dallas Morning News reported that President Clinton had dispatched six warships to Haiti "to enforce renewed economic sanctions" and "to press for the restoration of democracy there." The President also placed 150 infantry troops "on standby for possible duty on the Caribbean island."
On Friday morning I paid a visit to the JFK Assassination Information Center, located a few blocks from Dealey Plaza in the Katy Building. Their offices overlook the cenotaph at Market and Commerce.
The Center's purpose is "to gather information on the assassination and communicate that information to the public." But it was not open for business as usual the day I stopped by. I had learned this a week or so earlier, when I called to ask them their hours. They were in the midst of renovation, I'd been told, having just moved from their old location to more spacious quarters. They intended to re-open by early November --- in time for the assassination's thirtieth anniversary.
But the man I had spoken with on the phone said, "Why don't you stop by? We're always here." So I climbed the stairs to the building's sixth floor, where I found their main office. It was quite large, and quite devoid of any activity.
"Hello?" I called out. There was no answer.
There were a few charts and displays about the room, some fastened to the wall, others placed up against it. In the middle of the room was a scale model of Dealey Plaza, around three feet by three feet square and covered in plexiglass. A bright blue door was propped against a wall next to a shabby looking table; next to that was a dilapidated section of wooden fence.
In an office off to the side, I found a tired-looking man talking on the telephone. I caught his eye. He seemed surprised to see me but gestured to hold on, he'd be with me as soon as he hung up the phone.
There were several computer terminals off to one side of the room. On the other side was a large bookcase, and I scanned its contents. It was filled with assassination-related books, many of them readily available in most bookstores. Others were hard-to-find titles, such as Harold Weisberg's Post Mortem, and the somewhat mysterious Farewell America.
Farewell America was published in 1968 and credited to an author named James Hepburn. Shortly after it appeared, however, it was learned that Farewell America was written collectively by members of French intelligence. The bogus "author" was really just a name dreamed up by some sentimental spy: "James" played on the French J'aime, and "Hepburn" was from the object of this sentimental spy's affections, the late Audrey Hepburn.
(I have not read Farewell America. But according to one in-a-nutshell summation, its thesis is that JFK was a man "whose honest policies were so at odds with the power-mad and corrupt CIA and its billionaire oilmen kingmakers that he was accordingly snuffed.")
Anyway, this book and others were on the shelf, and I looked them over as I waited. Finally the man hung up the phone and said, a little uncertainly, "Hi --- what can I do for you?"
I introduced myself and we shook hands; he told me his name was Robert Johnson. "I wish you had called first," he said. "We're in the midst of a renovation."
I explained my situation to him: how I had planned my trip blindly, with no idea the Assassination Center might be closed. Johnson took pity on me: he took time out from whatever it was he'd been doing to give me a tour of the place.
As it happened, there was not a whole lot to see. While the AIC does indeed maintain exhibits on various aspects of the assassination, most of them were boxed up and waiting for a new home on the Katy Building's first floor.
But there was still some interesting stuff. "This was made by a student and given to us," Johnson said, indicating the Dealey Plaza model. The model was poorly made, its dimensions skewed, and Johnson smiled wryly as I stared. He hinted it would soon be collecting dust in a storeroom.
Then he led me over to the bright blue door. "This," he said, "came from Jack Ruby's apartment."
"It's the genuine article?"
"Oh yes. The owners changed it from apartments to a motel a few years ago. They completely renovated the place, and we were able to get the door."
Next to the door was the shabby looking table. I hadn't noticed it when I first came in, but resting on top of this table were a rifle and a mean-looking handgun.
Johnson pointed to the rifle. "This," he said gravely, "is the same type of weapon the Warren Commission said was used by Lee Harvey Oswald. The real one, of course, is in the National Archives, or some place like that. And this handgun is of the same type Ruby used to shoot Oswald."
I reached for the rifle. "May I...?"
"Sure."
"I assume it isn't loaded."
"That's right."
The alleged murder weapon was an Italian rifle, a bolt-action Mannlicher-Carcano described by an FBI expert as "a cheap old weapon." I drew a bead on a picture of JFK hanging on the wall across the room.
The "Oswald rifle" was, by all accounts, an amazingly inferior weapon, with out-of-kilter sites, a stubborn bolt, and a trigger that required considerable effort to squeeze. As Sylvia Meagher wrote, "A would-be assassin who selected this rifle would have to be hopelessly uninformed about firearms or desperately reluctant to hit his victim."
I laid the rifle back down on the table by the handgun. Even the table was an artifact: it had come from the lunch room of the Texas School Book Depository, where Oswald claimed he was at the time of the assassination.
The telephone rang, and Johnson excused himself to answer it. "No, we aren't open today," I heard him say. "We're in a transition period right now..."
An ancient-looking section of fence, greyed by weathering, was leaning against the wall by the lunch room table. It was from the original fence on top of the grassy knoll, portions of which had been replaced during the filming of Oliver Stone's JFK.
Also by the table was an embryonic display recounting the tale of a man named Roscoe White. White is regarded by some as a prime suspect in the killing, alleged to have been the grassy knoll button man --- or one of them. Most researchers, it seems, have dismissed the Roscoe White story as so much cowflop.
White is further alleged to have participated in the elimination of twenty-eight people with knowledge of the JFK hit, in the years following the assassination. He is said to have died under mysterious circumstances in 1971.
"Larry Howard is the real expert on the Roscoe White story," Johnson told me, after he hung up the phone. Howard is the director of the JFK AIC, but was not in the building at the time. "He'll be here this afternoon. Why don't you come back? I'm sure he'll be glad to talk with you."
As I left, Johnson gave me a copy of the latest AIC newsletter. "Let us know what you think of it," he said.
There is a man who operates a hot dog stand in Dealey Plaza, at the corner of Houston and Elm Streets, in the shadow of the Texas School Book Depository. This was where JFK's motorcade turned just before the first shots rang out. Like many in Dallas, this hot dog man has a tale to tell --- though his veracity is impossible to check.
I was backing into Elm Street, bringing this man into focus in my camera lens, when he said to me, "Maybe you should wait for the light to change."
Sure enough, traffic was bearing down on me. I stepped back up on the sidewalk. "This is a tricky corner," the man said. "You gotta watch out."
The lights changed. I got back in the street, and framed this hot dog vendor in my lens.
"A couple of years ago," he went on, "some guy's car went out of control here. He drove it right up on the curb and damn near smashed up my stand."
On the side of his stand was the word Smitty's. "Are you Smitty?"
"No, that's my partner. I'm Robert Tucker."
Tucker told me he was in Dealey Plaza the day of the assassination. "The shots came from over there," he said, pointing toward the grassy knoll. Then he told me something that, if true, would answer one of the nagging questions left by the photographic evidence of that dark day.
There is a picture taken by press photographer James Altgens at the moment of the assassination, which at present graced the cover of JFK Today. The Altgens photograph caused investigators a great deal of consternation when it first appeared, which was right after the assassination. JFK is seen clutching his throat in response to the first hit. In the background, in a doorway with many more onlookers, is a man who appears to be none other than Lee Harvey Oswald.
The resemblance is uncanny --- the man in the photo is even dressed as Oswald was, when he was arrested some ninety minutes later. But the FBI decided the man in the doorway was a Depository employee named Billy Lovelady. Oswald himself told police he was in the Depository lunch room when the assassination occurred.
But the controversy spawned by this picture was never laid entirely to rest. Too many people had too many reasons to lie. Moreover, there were some problems with the conclusion the man was Billy Lovelady.
To Robert Tucker, however, there is no controversy. He just says, "That's my dad."
"This guy?" I asked, incredulous. I held up JFK Today and pointed to the critical detail.
"Yeah. That's my dad!"
Tucker says he's somewhere in the Altgens photo, too. That means that when the assassination occurred, he was perhaps fifty feet from where today he sells hot dogs.
The JFK bus tour was one of the main events of my trip to Dallas. Sponsored by the Assassination Information Center, the tour goes by most of the locales that are central to the weekend of November 22-24, 1963.
As it turned out, I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as I had expected to. But a peculiar exchange occurred during it --- one that, for years to come, will have me wondering whether I made the right decision.
It was a three hour tour and cost twenty bucks. For that, I expected some pretty good information --- or at least showmanship. As it turned out, the bus driver, who was doing double duty as narrator, was not very well informed, and much of what he said was vague --- "This is the street Oswald crossed to catch a bus," he said at one point, not identifying which of several streets there he was referring to. I'm inclined to cut the driver some slack, though. It probably isn't too easy to drive and give detailed narration simultaneously.
The bus pulled out of Dealey Plaza under gloomy skies. First stop was the Dallas Trade Mart, just off the Stemmons Freeway, where Kennedy had been scheduled to deliver a speech to a business luncheon. Our bus rendezvoused with a second, smaller tour bus in the Trade Mart parking lot, and we passengers --- there were fewer than twenty --- switched buses.
Next stop was Parkland Hospital. It was to Parkland that the Kennedy motorcade sped after JFK was hit. In a weird twist, not only JFK, but Oswald and even Jack Ruby died there.
From Parkland the bus retraced the route of the Kennedy motorcade, from the President's arrival at Love Field to where he was bushwhacked. Then it was on to Oak Cliff, on the other side of the Trinity River, where Oswald had lived alone, in a seedy rooming house at 1026 North Beckley. We saw the place where Officer J.D. Tippit was shot to death at Tenth and Patton, drove to Jack Ruby's apartment nearby, and arrived finally at the Texas Theater, where Oswald was arrested less than two hours after the assassination.
From time to time during the tour, the driver would stop and let us out to inspect a location. But we couldn't always do this: officials at Parkland Hospital, for example, denied the bus permission to even stop, and at 1026 North Beckley, which is still occupied, a court order forbade anyone from getting too close. We were allowed off the bus, but were warned by the driver, "Anyone who even tries crossing the street will be left behind."
So it was a pleasant surprise to learn we could go right up to the Texas Theater and peer into its windows. Not that there was much to see: the place was closed, and obviously had been for some time. The ticket counter and most of the windows were all boarded up.
I took a few pictures of the Texas Theater sign, which appeared to be the same as in 1963. Then I looked through a narrow front door window. The driver had said a picture of JFK could be seen right inside. Sure enough, a mural honoring the slain president had been painted high on one wall.
That was about all there was to see. But as I turned to leave an elderly man approached me and asked if I wanted to go inside.
"You can get me in?" I asked.
"Sure can," he said, producing a set of keys from his jacket pocket. "I'm on the Theater Committee. We're trying to get this place declared a historic site."
"No kidding," I replied.
I looked back at the bus: the other passengers had all got back on. There wasn't much time.
"You know, I'd love to take you up on your offer. But I don't think the bus will wait for me."
"Well, that's okay."
"What's your name, sir?"
"Warren Burroughs."
"May I take your photograph?"
"Sure." He straightened his tie and readied himself. The keys were still in his hand.
"This will take a second," I said. "This is an old-fashioned camera, it takes me a second to adjust for the light and to focus."
"That's okay, take your time."
I did take my time, and I did take his picture, but I didn't take him up on his offer to let me in the theater, as much as I wanted to. Now I wish that I had. I learned later, almost by accident, that Warren "Butch" Burroughs was employed at the Texas Theater on the day of the assassination. He was working the candy counter. Inasmuch as Oswald snuck into the theater, Burroughs probably never even saw him that day. But I had been brushing up pretty close to a genuine part of the story, albeit a minor one, and it seemed like an opportunity that had been lost.
For someone who believes mightily there was a conspiracy to murder JFK, there is a lot to dislike about The Sixth Floor museum, where I went the day after the bus tour.
For starters, there is the fact that it is housed in the Book Depository. There is also the fact it is listed in the Dallas section of the AAA Tour Book for Texas, under the heading "What To See." This gives The Sixth Floor the stamp of officialdom; the tour book states casually that it is "the site from which the shots that killed President Kennedy...were fired."
The once-cavernous sixth floor is now partitioned, and crammed with exhibits recreating the Kennedy Administration years, as well as the assassination. Like rats in a maze, visitors move from exhibit to exhibit, getting the official story. Many carry Walkman-style tape players, rented for an extra two bucks, which provide a canned narration of events.
For a cynic like me, it is difficult to view The Sixth Floor as anything other than a monument to the Warren Commission. The few references that are made to the idea of conspiracy --- and admittedly, there are several --- amount to little more than lip service to the notion; the scales remain heavily weighted against Lee Harvey Oswald.
There are no museum officials on hand to answer questions at The Sixth Floor. Visitors are not allowed to take photographs. Virtually nothing remains as it was on November 22 1963; even the so-called "sniper's nest" in the building's southeast corner window has been reconstructed.
Security is strangely tight at this museum, like security at an airport. All bags are either checked at the door or run through an X-ray machine. Visitors must step through a metal detector before entering. It is the sort of security one would associate with a live president --- not a museum for a dead one.
I spent a final few hours in Dealey Plaza on Saturday afternoon, chatting with Doris, playing expert to less-informed tourists, and reading the graffiti on the fence on top of the grassy knoll.
A graffiti sampler: "Oswald didn't do it!" "God Bless JFK." "Thirty Years of Silence." "Thank-You, Jim Garrison and Oliver Stone." And from the loyal opposition: "Science has proven he was shot from behind. Whoever was back here MISSED!"
Several self-appointed assassination experts work on the grassy knoll. Most of them sell newsletters, and will gladly share an assassination theory, provided you buy one.
Steve Jameson, whom I had spoken with my first afternoon in Dallas, likes to use the concrete pergola as his stage; most of his well-polished sermon is delivered from the concrete mount where Abraham Zapruder filmed, that day in 1963.
A man named Dan Stevens likes to work the area around the fence. He approached me as I took pictures of graffiti. We talked for a while and I asked him a lot of questions; he told me he knows many important assassination witnesses personally.
When I asked my ninth or tenth question, he held up a copy of JFK Today and said, "You know, a lot of the answers are in here."
"I already bought one --- "
"No, really, it's okay --- "
" --- from a woman in a neckbrace."
Stevens frowned. "Oh, Doris. That keeps happening --- they buy 'em from her, then pick my brain!"
"Sorry, man."
"Aw...don't worry, it's cool."
I wasn't sure what to say next. After a moment he continued: "I've made a vow --- I'm gonna get a real job by November 22nd!"
Later on I saw him again, with a crowd of about five people hanging on his every word. Each held a copy of JFK Today. "Shots were definitely fired from behind this fence," Stevens told them. "But the first shot probably came from over there." He was pointing up Elm Street to the building across from the TSBD. "In 1963 that was known as the Dal-Tex building. It was outside the Dal-Tex building that Eugene Hale Brading was arrested a few minutes after the assassination. Now Eugene Hale Brading had ties to organized crime, and a police record as long as a gorilla's arm. Why did the cops grab Eugene Hale Brading? And more importantly, why did they let him go?"
In answer to that question Dan Stevens described a complex web of intrigue, involving the Mafia, the Dallas Police Department, the Ku Klux Klan, a right wing militant named Larrie Schmidt, Major-General Edwin Walker, and Dallas oil billionaire H.L. Hunt --- among others.
The glue that held it all together was that vaguely-defined entity known as the Military-Industrial Complex. The term was coined by President Dwight Eisenhower, who warned the nation in his farewell address: "We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes."
On November 22, 1993, Dealey Plaza will be dedicated as a national historic landmark. A plaque proclaiming it as such will be imbedded in the grassy knoll, on the north side of Elm Street.
Designating the area an official historic site was not a particularly popular idea in the city of Dallas. "One has to give emotions time to heal," an organizer said, commenting on opposition to the plan. But an official with the Dallas County Historical Foundation said the proclamation will serve to remind millions of people "that important events that change the course of history are not all celebratory in nature."
President Bill Clinton has been invited, and is expected to attend ceremonies marking the dedication. He will probably be the first president to enter Dealey Plaza since JFK.
No representative from the Kennedy family will be on hand. A spokeswoman for Senator Edward Kennedy said the family "prefers to try to celebrate [JFK's] life and not dwell on his death, which is obviously very painful and very emotional for them."
All photographs used herein Copyright © 1993 by John Kelin, except "The Man in the Doorway" photo, by James Altgens, and the above photo of JFK, published in the Warren Report, courtesy the National Archives.
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