...Tammy and I found ourselves at Dealey Plaza.
The original plan was to blog all along the trek that the two of us had going across America, just as I've blogged about seemingly everything and anything since 2004. But I discovered about this point of our odyssey that journeys of self-discovery lose something when you're also documenting it for public viewing as you venture forth. It was in Dallas that I went on a respite for awhile, that lasted almost two years. But in the end I came back, none the worse for wear, and filled with lots of stories to tell.
Such as August 1st, 2016. Now, I had come to Dealey Plaza the day before, on Sunday morning. There was very little traffic in the area. And I had to drive through it twice before I realized where we were. Dealey Plaza is much smaller than I had expected. This is the most analyzed, scrutinized, discussed, debated, and bitterly argued about patch of land in modern history. This is the focal point. This is where all the theories of the past sixty years and more converge upon. Dealey Plaza is where it all comes together at.
I thought it would be far bigger.
I really wanted to have a picture taken of us, but no one else was around. So we came back the next day about noon when there were more tourists about. That's when the above picture was taken. If you click and enlarge the photo and look at Elm Street behind where we're standing, you can see a small white X on the road, noting the position of the car when President John F. Kennedy received the fatal blow.
There's a parking lot near the old Texas School Book Depository building (now a museum). And it just so happened that there was an empty spot precisely at the picket fence atop the grassy knoll, where depending on what you choose to believe is where the second (or is that only?) gunman was who fired from in front of and toward the right of the Lincoln Continental carrying President Kennedy, Texas governor John Connally, and their wives.
So here's me and Tammy atop the grassy knoll:
Dealey Plaza is well worth a visit if you're ever in Dallas. The city has done a terrific job making it easy for people who find all the notable spots of that day, such as where Abraham Zapruder was standing when he shot the footage - the most studied length of film in history - with his camera.
This was a place I had long wanted to see with my own eyes. The assassination of John F. Kennedy is something that I still haven't come to any resolute conclusion in my own mind about. As I've gotten older I find myself increasingly believing that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, but I've also come to maintain an open mind about what happened on November 22nd, 1963. This is the grandest mystery in American history, and we are not likely to ever have any solid finality about it.
2 comments:
Visiting a place like that must have been some experience. Did it give you any feeling of finality about the assassination?
No Megan. It did not.
I guess that I left Dealey Plaza feeling somewhat disappointed in myself. After nearly a lifetime of studying the JFK assassination, I really believed that being there, where it happened, would settle the affair once and for all. And it didn't do that.
While I was there I went to where Abraham Zapruder was standing when he filmed the motorcade. Then I used my iPhone to pull up the footage from YouTube. I tracked the motorcade's route "as it happened", looking at it from Zapruder's exact location. And I found it hard to believe that a shot did not come from a position to the front and right of the car.
That doesn't mean that a gunman really was atop the knoll though. I *do* absolutely believe it's possible that there was.
No, there was no sense of finality that I gained from visiting Dealey Plaza. If anything I returned to our hotel room feeling more bewildered than before.
The older I get, the more I find myself thinking that Oswald was the lone gunman. But there will likely forever be an asterisk beside that notion in the files of my personal "memory palace".
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