political conventions - the sixth floor
TRANSCRIPT
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The Sixth FloorBy the time I saw Dealey Plaza in person, I’d seen it athousand times on TV, in newspaper diagrams and inmagazine pictures. This visit is the most moving I’ve had(other than to Berlin and concentration camps), in partbecause it was a surprise.
It’s very, very small. I expected more. The momentous event thathappened there demands more.
Under the arc of the Texas sky, in a big city of five million, the historicplaza almost disappears.
The global positioning system in my rental car directed me to a park-ing lot adjacent to the former Texas School Book Depository. It’s such anondescript part of town and mundane parking lot that I don’t imme-diately realize that I’m parked a few paces from the top of the so-calledGrassy Knoll, where “Badge Man” may have fired a shot at PresidentKennedy. “Badge Man” got his name from a reflection some peoplethink they saw over a wooden fence in pictures of the rise of landabove the street where the president was hit.
I arrived a little before the Sixth Floor Museum opened, so I decidedto walk around to see the historical setting. I stood staring at theexact spot where Kennedy was hit—the street, the triple overpassand the Grassy Knoll. I was on Houston Street, where the Kennedymotorcade slowed to turn right and then take a sharp left onto ElmStreet, right in front of the Texas School Book Depository. I hadto read a plaque commemorating the event to be sure that I wasactually looking at the scene I’d looked at so many times before onTV. It was too small and ordinary.
I was taken aback at the mundane convergence of urban roads withoutan apparent purpose. Houston Street forms the base of a triangle,bounded on the other two sides by Elm and Commerce Streets. Thetriple overpass crosses the apex of the triangle, and there’s a lawn inthe middle. Kennedy’s motorcade had meandered through a net ofnarrow streets, slowing on each turn. The heavy limousine, with armor,extra seats and heavy-duty modifications, had to slow down even morethan a regular car. The roads the limo took seem to go from no particu-lar place to some other nondescript and unimportant place—a mani-festation of urban zeal for pouring concrete and spreading asphalt.
The concrete pillars—one of which gave amateur photographerAbraham Zapruder a slightly better vantage point—were part of aWorks Progress Administration project. So the roads may indeedrun from nowhere to nowhere, but they created much needed jobsat the time.
Still on Houston Street at the base of this urban triangle, I was a fewpaces from the patch of grass in the middle of the Plaza on which a fewdozen spectators watched the president get shot. Short strides took meto the grass where “Babushka Lady” stood taking film of the president’scar and thus also pictures of the Grassy Knoll in the background. Thislady got her name from the kerchief she wore and was of great interestafter the assassination, because no one could find her or her pictures.
With little traffic on the make-work street, I strode across Elm at aleisurely pace. I probably stepped right on the spot where SecretService Agent Clinton J. Hill jumped out of the car that followedKennedy’s. By the time he had a hold of the presidential limousine,Mrs. Kennedy was on the trunk, in shock, perhaps trying to recover alarge piece of her husband’s head. Agent Hill shoved her back into herseat and held on, shielding the couple from further shots which didnot come and were not necessary.
On the other side of the street, I strode up the Grassy Knoll, the samepath a policeman took, gun drawn, after spectators, and perhaps he,thought a shot had been fired from its crest. That hill is too small. It’sreally just a few steps to the top, taking about as much energy out ofme as a staircase at home. It’s equally inconsequential. Is it possiblethat anything happened up here and that a fit policeman and count-less eyewitnesses found nothing when they looked over the fenceseconds after the event?
Around the other side of this beaten-up five-foot wooden picket fence,I half expected to see the “three tramps” frozen in time, looking suspi-cious enough to get arrested and then released. But they’re not there,44 years later.
As I turn back from looking for the tramps and peer over the fence towhere the president was shot, I realize that most boys past the age ofeight could have hit his car with a softball. After these lessons in geome-try and trajectory, I visited the actual building from which Oswald fired.
The museum is both superfluous and mandatory. It’s all there—thebackground of the times, the need for a political trip to Texas, thecountless uneaten meals at the Trademart where Kennedy was duenext, the Warren Commission, the conspiracy theories, the pictures ofOswald leaning the wrong way with the wrong chin and the wrongshadow on his face. But we knew all that.
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What’s mandatory is to view the random assemblage of cardboardboxes on a ratty wooden floor beside a ratty bare warehouse wall fromwhich Oswald fired his shots. It’s a bit of an awkward shot. I wouldhave rested the rifle on my left thigh and the windowsill and had a padto kneel on with my right knee. But Oswald sat on a box, perhaps tosave his knee, and put his right foot on another box, allowing him torest his left elbow on his left thigh. After operating the bolt of his mail-order Manlicher-Carcano, he must have fired with his right elbowparallel to the ground, or perhaps on his right thigh, to complete thesteady platform from which he shot. This is also where Oswald had hislast bag lunch as a free man and one of the last half-dozen or so mealshe had in life.
Minutes later, Kennedy was dead at Parkland Hospital. Days later,Oswald was dead at Parkland Hospital. Years later, Jack Ruby, Oswald’skiller, was dead at Parkland Hospital.
Then there are the astronomically high coincidences and preposterousanomalies of the case. The sloppy police work, the misfit defector tothe Soviet Union who once had his picture taken in the same roomwith John Wayne, the acoustic experts finding a shot from the GrassyKnoll, the magic bullet that fell off a gurney at Parkland Hospital afterdoing quadruple duty in the limo that day, the Kennedy “wanted”posters, the Cubans, organized crime, the cheers in some Dallasschools when Kennedy’s death was announced, no autopsy at Parklandand a botched autopsy in Washington, missing witnesses, deadwitnesses, missing frames of the Zapruder film and on and on it goes.
Kennedy had asked Secretary of Defense McNamara to relieve GeneralWalker of his command in Europe after the general had passed outinflammatory literature to his troops. The general became a high-profile John Birch Society member, handing out literature from hishome in Dallas. While he was sitting at home doing his income taxes,somebody took a shot at the General—probably Oswald.
Preposterous. Improbable. But it happened.
If you’re going to assassinate someone, you need a dozen people—especially women. Just as in the movies, women kiss the bad guy onthe park bench, to make it look like he’s not the suspect. Women hideweapons and assassins. Women with baby carriages are especiallyhelpful in getting weapons to and from the site. You need a safe housefor at least a couple of weeks.
It is preposterous to think that in 44 years no picture, piece ofevidence, death-bed confession or anything else has conclusivelylinked anyone else to the assassination.
We cling to conspiracies in the hope that a life so grand, with suchpromise, was not ended in an idiotic place by an idiot. The contrast istoo great.
But in the end Kennedy’s Camelot White House was indeed ended aftera bag lunch behind boxes of books.
It’s all just too preposterous and too small.
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