The silver X mark where the bullet struck is branded on to the asphalt of the sloping road on Elm Street just as the nightmarish events of November 22nd, 1963 have become seared into the subconscious of several generations of Americans. They cannot get over JFK.
Friday marked the 61st anniversary of the assassination of president John F Kennedy. Almost all of those directly or indirectly involved with that shocking day have died – although Marina Oswald, widow of the slain assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, still lives in the city. Kennedy is a distant symbol of a previous century and yet the place where he died remains a beacon for visitors: macabre as it seems, it is the number one tourist attraction in Dallas.
And Dealey Plaza is a time warp. It’s all there, just as depicted in the thousands of photographs and documentaries and films obsessed with uncovering some unanswerable truth about that day. There is the brown, sturdy Texas Book Depository from where Oswald fired the bullets as the presidential cavalcade moved slowly down Elm Street. The sixth-floor corner window has been preserved as part of a museum and from the street, visitors can gaze up and see the lower sash open and the cardboard boxes that served as a prop for the rifle, as if Oswald had just recently fled.
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Architecturally, the book depository is unremarkable – as though designed not to be noticed. But within a decade of the Kennedy assassination it had become one of the most photographed buildings in the world. And there is the Grassy Knoll, the small sloping hill above the road where an excited crowd gathered that day for a glimpse of Camelot glamour, and from where many witnesses swore they heard a second shot fired and saw a puff of smoke. The “grassy knoll” that has long entered the lexicon as a byword for conspiracy and has featured in everything from The Simpsons (where Marge’s blue-dye hairdo is spotted rising above the famous picket fence) to Stephen King’s 11/22/63, a beseeching novel about an everyman who travels back, via a time-slip, to the day to try to prevent Oswald from killing the president and thus altering history.
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The day I visited last week happened to be a Friday, the same day as the assassination occurred, and it was noontime. The weather was much the same – a bleached-out sunny November. On the knoll and across the way, small groups of people stood holding earnest, intense conversations about “the first bullet” or “the other gunman”. And the sixth floor museum was busy with visitors – internationals and young families and school groups who were given a guided visual tour through the stunning photographs by Jacques Lowe (whose archive of some 40,000 negatives was, incredibly, stored in the Twin Towers and lost on 9/11) of the Kennedy mythology.
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The general theme is of paradise lost and of the young, glamorous president and first lady moving inexorably towards the minute that became an inflection point for the United States. The invitation to the Trade Mart lunch (at noon) is preserved. The mock-up original Morning News front page – “Dallas Greets President’ (Crowd cheers wildly for JFK; Jackie Sparkles, Lady Bird too)” – is framed. The last minutes of the cavalcade are captured in black and white, still after still. The glassed-off area where Oswald, a book depository employee, waited, is just as it was. The floorboards are the same: nothing has changed. The extraordinary FBI miniature reconstruction of Dealey Plaza is on show. Being there is a haunting and sombre experience.
And outside, in the shaded memorial veranda adjacent to the Grassy Knoll are the artists and sleuths and writers who have dedicated much of their lives to investigating the assassination, and the belief that there was a cover-up. Marshall Evans is there with copies of his book, JFK: The Reckoning, in which he argues that Oswald was not the only assassin – or may not have been the assassin at all.
It goes without saying that those most affected by the murder were Kennedy’s immediate and extended family, and then the millions who mourned him.
But visiting Dealey Plaza makes it clear that the assassination was something that happened to Dallas, too. There was, for city residents, a mortifying shame associated with the entire gothic spectacle: the smiling handsome president, the implicit trust associated with the open-top car from which he waved at the masses and the imperishable images of Jackie Kennedy scrambling across the flat trunk of the car trying to retrieve her husband’s shattered skull. For years afterwards, locals would speak of travelling throughout the US and learning not to say they were from Dallas.
It is sometimes argued that two cultural phenomena helped to change the national perception of Dallas: the city’s beloved football team, the Cowboys, and the shenanigans of JR Ewing and company out on Southfork ranch.
As a city, Dallas had a choice: to change Dealey Plaza beyond recognition or to preserve it. A few attempts to raze the book depository failed, thanks mainly to the intercession of Wes Wise, the Dallas mayor in the decade after the killing. But almost three decades would pass before the city took the steps of turning the building into a commemoration. And it took 50 years before Dallas felt ready to hold an official anniversary event, on a bitterly cold day, during which the then mayor, Mike Rawlings, grappled with the legacy of that day for locals.
“We watched the nightmarish reality that in our front yard, our president had been taken from us, taken from his family, taken from the world,” he said. “Out of that tragedy, an opportunity was granted to us.”
The opportunity was to preserve the terrible urban mundanity of the place where Kennedy was killed and to present, through the museum, the uneasy political atmosphere of the time. The elements of mistrust, polarisation and heightened political tensions are, of course, again at the forefront of American life and this summer saw the latest attempted assassination of an American president.
Meanwhile, on Dealey Plaza, the traffic rushes hourly and yearly over the permanent X on the road which marks a divergent route for US history. And still the conspiracy theories flitter overhead.