JFK +50

We'll take a short break from our usual UK trip programming to bring you this message from US History. 

My father, who watched Jack Kennedy's legendary press conferences with strict regularity, tells me I used to point at our little black and white TV and blurt out "Kenny! Kenny!" when I saw the man on TV. Dad was a fan and a supporter - an FDR Democrat, an Irish Catholic, WW2 veteran, a few years younger than JFK but of the same generation, invested in JFK like most Catholics and many WW2 vets and many middle-aged working people who remember FDR and the New Deal were.

Demographically, I am (so I am told) right at that you're-old-enough-to-remember age to recall the JFK assassination in the first person. I was 5 and a half, give or take a month.

I actually don't remember the assassination, or Oswald's murder, but I do remember quite clearly the funeral procession through DC, which happened that Sunday.

Maybe I'm two days on this side of that line.

The drums, the creaking of the caisson wheels, the rider-less horse, the crowds lined up along the route. It struck me as odd, this TV coverage of the procession, that proceeded without any TV commentator voiceover. I did know what it meant. I'd never seen anything like it, and haven't still, fifty years later. I have seen a lot - a LOT - of assassination weekend footage in the ensuing years. The funeral feels different from all of it. Because I remember it.

The other memory I have, quite a vivid one, is of seeing and picking up a copy of Six Seconds In Dallas, Josiah Thompson's landmark 1967 book on the crime, on a coffee table at my uncle Vin's lavish and glassy-modern Manursing Island home, probably sometime in 1967 or '68. Vin was a upper-level executive at IBM at that time, and would become CEO a few years later. He had a wall full of books, but this is the one that was out on the coffee table.

I leafed through the book. Diagrams and blurry photo enlargements and lengthy captions...it was a heavy book, I was a little fascinated with it.

The assassination and the (apparently) manifest evidence of a conspiracy lingered in my consciousness for years, and three decades after the fact, I went through a period of intense reading on the subject, prompted (if I recall accurately) by the British TV program  "The Men Who Killed Kennedy", a sober and fairly exhaustive documentary written by a guy named Nigel Turner, which initially aired in 1988 and posited the theory that Kennedy was probably killed by the New Orleans and Chicago mob through the hired marksmanship of a notorious Marseilles hitman, Lucien Sarti. (The theory has largely since been discredited, as there is strong evidence that Sarti was in a French prison at the time of the hit. And Sarti never had the chance to address or refute the charges - he was killed in Mexico City in 1972.)

But I immersed myself in book after book - Lifton, Marrs, Groden, Lane. Even at that time, early 1990's, I had only scratched the surface of conspiracy-tilting assassination literature, but nonetheless I went through 12 or 14 books in a couple of years, and used to share notes with a friend who was a simpatico assassination buff. (He retired from the JFK conspiracy thing after reading Gerald Posner's Case Closed, which, itself, has come under repeated fire by conspiracy researchers.)

I eventually shelved the JFK obsession - not because Posner or anyone else convinced me of the conspiracy-deflating assertion of Oswald's solitary guilt in the case, but because...this was in the days just before the internet, so I believe it was because, quite simply, I had purchased every assassination book available from my local bookstore. Sounds silly, but it's true. I ran out of books.

And because, I think, to some extent I came to believe that the truth was ultimately now unknowable. The trail was cold. Countless cranks and publicity seekers claimed to have the final evidence of conspiracy and the last word on who was behind the hit. Some admitted to actually being the Grassy Knoll shooter, or the one who supplied the weapons, or facilitated the getaway. Someone claimed to have run a metal detector over Dealy Plaza and found a bullet, sometime in the 1990's. Really ????

The internet came, and unsurprisingly, the commerce in assassination conspiracy lore exploded. In my view, rather than clarify and solidify the case for or against Oswald, it has only muddied the waters. The bottom line for me, I guess, is that even if the actual Grassy Knoll shooter came forward today, fifty years later, and admitted his guilt, and laid out the entire scenario (with or without Oswald as a very cleverly planted and framed "patsy"), it would be impossible to prove. The truth has no mechanism now to stand above the lies, or the misinformation. We settle on Oswald because that's the baseline against which to compare the conspiracy. The mythology has grown larger than the truth could ever be.

I remember a few years ago when Nellie Connally died. The last living occupant of the Limo. She had been petitioned for years by assassination researchers to allow exhumation of her husband's body and examine his remains for fragment of The Magic Bullet that may have been imbedded in the soft tissue or bones in his right wrist - should there have remained too much metal in Connally's body, it would have proven that exhibit 399 could not have produced the wounds in both men, that JFK and Connally were hit by different bullets, and given the already established shooting timeframe, proved the presence of at least two gunmen firing at the motorcade.

But she refused, and that was that.

JFK's assassination is the most meticulously studied crime in US history, and I am comfortably assured that if I wanted to dive back into it, I would never, for the remainder of my natural life, run out of books, internet blogs and videos to satiate a revived obsession. Part of me wants to.

I really don't know what to believe.

I still don't know why a guy who had just shot the leader of the free world, from his place of employment, with his own gun, would hurry down the stairs afterward just to buy a Coke and stand around. Nor, why a guy who it is said was a importance-craving nobody would vehemently deny upon questioning that he had just perpetrated the biggest crime of the twentieth century. Something doesn't feel right there. Oswald is portrayed as a cunning assassin one minute, a confused and delusional psychopath the next, methodical and calculating here, unhinged and incoherent there. You can't know when it comes to homicidal nutcases, they say.

Anyway. Tomorrow marks fifty years since the assassination. I sort of remember the event, and I sort of became, at least for a time, an assassination buff. I do not weary of The Chase, but I have other things to do and other passions to dance with, and the Rorschach pastiche that has become the assassination continues to produce disgraceful fraud, clever insight, breathtaking scholarship and mountains of evidence that only serve to keep the event clouded by distrust and speculation and questionable motives of many who wish to attach themselves to History.

I do know that almost everyone who has written about the assassination is wrong about who did it, and it's a big crowd.

Maybe someday, we or someone after us will know, once and for all. But I doubt it.

I still remember the horse.