Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  With respect to President Kennedy’s grave site, in 1962, the year before Kennedy was assassinated, one million people visited Arlington National Cemetery. During the six months following the assassination, nine million came. Today, approximately four and a half to five million people visit the cemetery each year. When I asked Tom Sherlock, the cemetery’s historian, “Approximately how many of these visitors visit President Kennedy’s grave site?” he replied, “99.9 percent. Unless they’re coming here specifically to visit a loved one’s grave, they’re coming to see JFK’s grave and the Tomb of the Unknown Solider.”4

  The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, Massachusetts, opened on October 21, 1979, with David Powers, who was in the presidential motorcade in Dallas and was one of JFK’s very closest aides and confidants, as curator, a position he maintained up to his death in 1998. The museum and library contain no assassination-related materials other than several hundred selected books on the assassination, an archivist telling me in 2004 that “we celebrate the president’s life, not his death.” The museum and library have been averaging about 225,000 visitors per year, with 210,594 in 2004.5

  As with no other case in American history, network and cable TV, as well as the nation’s print media, unfailingly continue to mark the anniversaries of Kennedy’s death with feature stories and presentations. And of course conspiracy authors continue to write books on their pet theories of the assassination, eighty-four new books coming out since 2003 alone. (Telephone interview of James Sawa on November 26, 2006)

  But the only day-in-and-day-out operation or memorial to the assassination of any significance is the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza in Dallas. In 1977, Dallas County purchased the turn-of-the-century building at Elm and Houston, which had been leased to the Texas School Book Depository Company between 1962 and 1970, for the dual purpose of saving a historical site and using the office space. The building reopened in 1981 as the Dallas County Administration Building and eventually the first five floors were occupied by offices, the sixth and seventh floors remaining vacant, with very few visitors allowed to go to the sixth floor. In 1983, the nonprofit Dallas County Historical Foundation was created to raise funds for and to operate a $3.5 million museum on the sixth floor, and the museum opened to much fanfare on February 20, 1989. The museum is meant to be a permanent historical and educational display of photographs, films, graphics, charts, and other related interpretive materials pertaining to the assassination. Under the direction of the museum’s curator, Gary Mack, and its executive director, Jeff West, as of 2005 the museum had collected over twenty-five thousand items pertaining to the assassination, including oral history audiotapes and videotapes of witnesses and others associated in some way with the participants or events of November 22 to 24, 1963. Artifacts include Abraham Zapruder’s camera, one of the three first-generation copies of the out-of-camera original film made on the afternoon of the assassination (the other two, with the out-of-camera film, are at the National Archives), and the FBI model of Dealey Plaza used by the Warren Commission. Everyone, naturally, wants to go to the “corner window,” the sniper’s nest window where Oswald fired at Kennedy below, but the area is now enclosed by Plexiglas. However, one can clearly see the window and study the area from close quarters. Gerry Spence and I went to the window in 1986, before it was enclosed.

  The Sixth Floor Museum attracts an average of 450,000 visitors annually, and well over 4 million people have gone to the museum since it opened in 1989. The museum, which also operates a bookstore on the premises selling books and miscellaneous items related to the assassination and the Kennedy family, is managed by a staff of over forty full-and part-time employees and is open seven days a week (except Christmas) from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. at an admission cost of ten dollars. In 2002, the museum renovated and opened the seventh floor, renting it out for special events, such as an exhibit in March of 2003 of silk-screen portraits of Jacqueline Kennedy created by Andy Warhol in the months following the assassination.

  In 1970, the city of Dallas erected the JFK Memorial. Located on a block of land owned by Dallas County and bordered by Main, Record, Elm, and Market streets, the memorial, just one block east of Dealey Plaza, is a cenotaph, an empty tomb erected in memory of a deceased person whose body is buried elsewhere. The inscription on a plaque near the cenotaph reads, “An open tomb that symbolizes the freedom of Kennedy’s spirit.” The very large, white structure (2,500 square feet and thirty feet high), consisting of seventy-two white, precast concrete columns, was designed by Philip Johnson, a prominent architect and friend of the Kennedy family. The simple inscription “John Fitzgerald Kennedy” is in gold leaf on two sides of a low, black granite block in the center of the tomb. Bleak, and with no apparent attempt to be aesthetically pleasing to the eye, there were suggestions a few years ago that the tomb be torn down.6

  Directly across the street from the JFK Memorial at 110 South Market is the Conspiracy Museum, a two-story structure that has a bookstore, gift shop, documentary theater, and exhibits such as “The Three Hobos,” “Mystery Death List,” and a wall chart display of “Who Killed JFK?” The museum is open seven days a week and has smaller exhibits dealing with the assassinations of Lincoln and RFK as well as JFK. The president of the museum, Tom Bowden, advertises it as “the only place in Dallas to learn about the conspiracy” surrounding the assassination of Kennedy. The museum’s predecessor at the same location was the Assassination Information Center, which was founded in 1989 by the late Larry Howard. Shortly after he died in 1994, and under the new ownership of R. B. Cutler, the Conspiracy Museum started up.

  The Rose Hill Cemetery where Oswald was buried is now known as Shannon Rose Hill Memorial Park, located in a low-income area of Fort Worth at 7301 East Lancaster. During a visit there on November 30, 2000, a Memorial Park official told me that around four or five people a week visit Oswald’s grave. Originally, Oswald’s headstone had his first name on it as well as the years of his life, but after the exhumation in 1981, a new, flat, red headstone simply says, “OSWALD,” with no first name or years on it. Facing Oswald’s grave from a nearby road inside the cemetery, one can see where Oswald’s mother, Marguerite, who died of cancer in 1981, is buried, without any headstone or marker, to Oswald’s left. To his right is a headstone with the name “Nick Beef” on it. No one is buried there. The official said she had been told that several years ago some person had paid for the small plot and requested that the fictitious name be placed on the headstone. She did not know why.7

  Though an entire nation grieved over the death of President Kennedy, his assassin’s mother grieved hard for her son in the years before she died. Her sole purpose in life seemed to be to convince the world of her son’s innocence. “Lee Harvey Oswald died an innocent man,” she would say. Persuaded that he “was framed,” she would point out that “he was neither tried nor convicted for his alleged crime.” At times she would go beyond this, as when she told the media, in support of her petition to have her son reburied in Arlington National Cemetery, that her son had “done more for his country than any other living human being.” Or when, claiming to have “a very unusual ESP,” she said, “so doesn’t it stand to reason that if my boy shot the President, I would have known at the time it happened?” Living in isolation from her family, she never saw her two grandchildren by Lee after November of 1963, and she spent her final years trying to ward off poverty by selling his letters from Russia and other memorabilia to pay the rent.

  In May of 1964, during a television program about President Kennedy’s grave, the scene shifted to her son’s grave and the announcer’s words cut to the bottom of her heart. “The assassin’s grave has on it a dead tree,” she recalled his saying. “And a picture was shown of a tree. The leaves had fallen off and it certainly looked dead. Alone in my house I broke down and wept. I soon learned that the tree had been planted a few days earlier, since my last visit to the cemetery. I did not know who put it there, but it had not been wate
red. I was determined that by the next Sunday my son’s grave would be the nicest-looking in that section of the Rose Hill Burial Park. I pruned the tree, and I felt sure that there was life left in the roots. So I went back every day for a week, morning and evening, to water the tree. And in five days, the ‘dead’ tree in which the television announcer found so much ironic symbolism, started to bloom. Some may wonder why I take such an interest in the grave. First of all, my son is buried there. Regardless of what the world says or thinks, he is still my son. I keep the grave nice, too, because of the many people who come to visit. I, as a mother, want these people to go back home knowing a mother’s love for a son is everlasting.”8

  In Memoriam

  Everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing the moment they heard Kennedy had died.

  —Common observation about Kennedy’s murder

  It was a transforming moment for America because we lost hope. Every president who succeeded Kennedy—they all had good points and bad points—but the legacy of hope died with him. You never had that sense again that we were moving forward, that we could do things.

  —Helen Thomas, White House correspondent, United Press International

  My really first conscious thoughts were just “My God, what a…great tragedy…What a horrible, horrible tragedy,” and how, in the space of a fleeting moment, things can change. Here we were, two relatively young men—we were almost the identical age, riding with what I would like to believe were two of the most beautiful wives in this country. The President and Jackie were happy. We were proud to be their hosts in Texas, and had a tremendous welcome in San Antonio, Houston, Fort Worth and Dallas…There was just joy, anticipation, wonderful throngs of people…And then in the space of a few seconds…it is unbelievable how an incident can happen that changed all of our lives, changed the course of history for many people in so many different ways you will never know.

  —Governor John Connally to CBS correspondent Martin Agronsky at Connally’s Parkland Hospital bedside a few days after the assassination

  People have to realize that that was a very innocent time, and the very idea that a president could be shot down in the streets of America was absolutely unthinkable.

  —Sixty-six-year-old Ventura County, California, resident

  I think that for young people, of which I was one at the time, he spoke to the best of our instincts. He brought people together. He didn’t drive them apart. His spirit, elan, and charisma were uniquely American. For those of us who remember, it is undying.

  —U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein

  It is more satisfying to believe that Kennedy died as a victim of a cause rather than at the hands of a deranged gunman.

  —Thomas Reed Turner, Abraham Lincoln scholar

  In 1963, I lived in the small mountain village of Miraflores, Colombia, with several other Peace Corp volunteers. One of our compadres returned home that evening by horseback. He told of meeting a campesino [farmer] on the trail who called out to him “Han matado a nuestro presidente” (They have killed our president). He assumed that the president of Colombia had been killed.

  —C. J. Lemonds of Plano, Texas, in a letter to the editor of Dallas Morning News

  I don’t get why anyone wanted to shoot him. What did he do wrong?

  —Dallas high school student in 2003

  The first thing about him was his driving intelligence. His mind was always on fire. His reading was prodigious, his memory almost total recall of facts and quotations. A friend of mine once crossed the Atlantic on a liner with the Kennedy family years ago. She remembered the day 12-year-old Jack was ill in his stateroom. There lay the thin, freckled little boy reading Churchill’s early life, other books scattered about his bed. John Kennedy’s intellectuality was perhaps the hallmark of his nature, even more than his youth…He was that rare and precious combination, the man of contemplation as well as the man of action. He had a sharp sense of history from his immense reading, and was acutely conscious of what his own place in history might be.

  —CBS commentator Eric Sevareid

  For the millions who mourned Kennedy, the grief and disbelief that followed his killing left a mark that is indelible to this day. Many likened the event to the death of a family member.

  —Dallas Morning News, November 17, 2003

  At the time Kennedy was killed I was 8 years old and in the third grade of my school in a small, rural village in northern Honduras called La Veinte y Ocho. Everyone there considered Kennedy to be the president of the people, not just the president of the United States, because he was concerned about the poor. For instance, under a program called CARITAS, the Kennedy administration started providing milk for the first time ever for school children in Honduras and throughout Central America. The people of my village took Kennedy’s death very hard and I clearly remember there was a lot of mourning and crying.

  —Carlos Pena, now an American citizen living in Los Angeles

  To show you the way that the minds of people were poisoned against the community [Dallas], I went to Detroit about two months after the assassination for a meeting with the automotive people. I got in a cab and I said, “Take me to the Detroit Athletic Club, please.” The cab driver said, “You must be from the South.” And I said, “I am.” He said, “Where are you from?” I said, “Texas.” He said, “Where in Texas?” I said, “Dallas.” He stopped the cab and said, “Get out. I ain’t taking you anywhere.”

  —James Chambers Jr., president of the Dallas Times Herald

  He appealed to and elicited a sense of idealism instead of cynicism.

  —Peace Corps volunteer Tina Martin

  What John F. Kennedy left us with most of all was an attitude. To put it in the simplest terms, he looked ahead. He knew no more than anyone else what the future was going to be like, but he did know that that was where we ought to be looking.

  —Bruce Catton, senior editor of the American Heritage magazine

  His life was such—the radiance he shed—that if we live to be a hundred, we will remember how he graced this earth, and how he left it.

  —Melville Bell Grosvenor, president and editor of National Geographic Society

  He brought gaiety, glamour, and grace to the American political scene in a measure never known before. That lightsome tread, that debonair touch, that shock of chestnut hair, that beguiling grin, that shattering understatement—these are what we shall remember. He walked like a prince and he talked like a scholar. His humor brightened the life of the Republic. Shown his latest nephew in August, he commented, “He looks like a fine baby—we’ll know more later…” When the ugliness of yesterday has been forgotten, we shall remember him, smiling.

  —Washington Evening Star editorial

  He was the most civilized President we have had since Jefferson, and his wife made the White House the most civilized house in America [alluding undoubtedly to the famous dinners the president and his wife hosted whose attendance was heavily sprinkled with cultural icons from the world of theater, art, literature, music, the sciences, and academe].

  —Historian and author Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

  Kennedy brought more than courage and energy to the White House. Like Sir Winston Churchill, he had a style of his own. And, like Churchill, he had that indefinable thing called grace. Churchill always had style but he developed grace late. Kennedy always had it, and showed it in his quiet humor, even at his own expense, and in his avoidance of political brawling. Grace helped him enormously in American foreign relations: his good nature, his warmth, his good will, and generally his good judgment. It helped him with American voters, too. Kennedy fitted into the presidency almost elegantly.

  —James Marlowe, Associated Press

  John Fitzgerald Kennedy was struck down in his prime, as he was still striding buoyantly through the halls of Camelot. He had served his thousand days as America’s leader with wit and charm and courage and grace. That is the way most Americans choose to remember him and the brief, shining
moments of his presidency.

  —Bob Clark, Washington correspondent, ABC News

  When Jack quoted something, it was usually classical, but I’m so ashamed of myself—all I keep thinking of is this line from a musical comedy. At night, before we’d go to sleep, Jack liked to play some records; and the song he loved most came at the very end of this record. The lines he loved to hear were: Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot. There’ll be great Presidents again, but there’ll never be another Camelot again…it will never be that way again.

  —Jacqueline Kennedy, giving birth to the Camelot appellation as it applied to JFK’s thousand days in office, in an interview with historian Theodore H. White for the December 6, 1963, Life magazine memorial edition on President Kennedy

  I should have known that he was magic all along. I did know it—but I should have guessed it could not last. I should have known that it was asking too much to dream that I might have grown old with him and see our children grow up together.

  —Jacqueline Kennedy

  I’ve never covered anything like it [President Kennedy’s assassination]. Not before, not since, and I don’t expect to in this lifetime, nor any lifetime beyond, to infinity and beyond.

  —Dan Rather, CBS News

  Forever young in our collective minds, if John F. Kennedy, at forty-three the youngest man to be elected president in American history, were alive today, he would be ninety years old.