In the annals of American time, the November 22nd that happened sixty years ago today still casts a very long shadow. It is a cliché, but true nonetheless, that certain events are singularly imprinted—or, maybe, emblazoned—on the consciousness of entire generations. That November day remains pivotal for my generation, as Pearl Harbor was for my father’s, or 9/11 for my daughter’s.
What is perhaps less evident is how these events not only forge a strong memory, but will suddenly make memory exist, turning our minds inside out. Whereas private things rising from within ourselves had once reigned, public things, coming from outside, now take pride of place. The private obsessions come back, of course, but the public ones now become hard to shake or ignore. My father feels this way about Pearl Harbor, which happened when he was six. Before the attack, he had been a kid on whom outside events, baseball aside, impinged remotely and vaguely; after, he became a hungry newspaper reader—until a few years ago, I had his collection of Philadelphia Bulletin front pages, documenting the war—and, in the most basic sense, he became a man of the world.
November 22, 1963, which occurred, neat near-symmetry, when I was seven, had the same effect on me. I was walking home from school and heard the news from a stranger with a transistor radio and saw my father, very uncharacteristically—he was not even much of a Kennedy fan—in tears in our front yard. (He was hardly alone. Robert Lowell, the poet and passionate conscientious objector, wrote that he was “weeping through the first afternoon.”) My inner obsession at the time, I will confess, was the animated version of “Casper the Friendly Ghost”—I had the first serious crush of my life on his friend, Wendy the Good Little Witch—and I knew instantly, with the sickened, oppressed prescience of children, that Saturday-morning cartoons would be cancelled. Yet if before that day I was only vaguely aware of World Events—I can recall my parent’s anxiety at the Cuban missile crisis, a cloud of ominous apprehension a year before; and can see Dr. King on black-and-white television delivering his “I have a dream” speech against a background of preoccupied observers—I still had the interiority, what we wrongly call the innocence, of childhood. From then on, everything that happened out there happened in me. I can recall every public moment, from the escalation in Vietnam that Kennedy’s successor began to the subsequent assassinations and of course all else since—it’s as crystal clear as, well, a Saturday-morning cartoon. And, like many, I later shared the obsession with the details and imagery of the assassination, so that the single-bullet theory, the overpass, the triple underpass, the Moorman polaroid, the sixth floor of the Book Depository, were all eerily familiar to me, with all their ominous and dreadful associations.
And so, it was with a sense of personal obligation this past spring—in Dallas on a book tour, and impelled by an invigorating cocktail of curiosity and that 9/11 daughter’s order to walk ten thousand steps a day—that I finally walked down to Dealey Plaza, which I had seen so often in so many photographs of those sad and horrible seconds. I was at first shocked—but shocked by the predictable shock that we encounter whenever we visit a famous place about which we have often read: how much smaller it is in reality than our imagination had rendered it. A truth equally applicable to the bedroom where Lincoln died and of Omaha Beach in Normandy. They are more diminutive in scale than the intensity of our searching had made them.
I was still more startled—I am sure I shouldn’t have been, but I was—by the truth that nothing significant had altered in the layout or the articulation of Elm Street in the nearly sixty years since: the triple underpass is just as it was, and hundreds of speeding cars ran right through it as I stood there. Millions of cars, during these six decades, must have passed over exactly the same asphalt that J.F.K. experienced in his last conscious seconds on Earth, with the spot where the fatal shot struck marked merely by an “X” in the roadway. Not the same cars, and not the same asphalt, obviously, but the same pattern of traffic. It is as if Ford’s Theatre were still in place not as a museum but as a living theatre, never altered, with the President’s box still regularly occupied by theatregoers who have only a vague sense that something important once happened there.
I will also confess, to the ire of those conspiracy theorists for whom Dealey Plaza remains an obsession, that, for me, the sheer smallness of the place confirmed the likelihood that the familiar account of the assassination, or the “cover story,” if you insist, is true. The distance between the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository and that fatal “X” is, for a rifleman, minuscule. It would have been hard for anyone to miss. And it would have been wildly impractical to plan an ambush at the location—no way for anyone to have been concealed behind the picket fence, refurbished but still there, or within the stone pergola, still there. If there were hidden assassins on the grassy knoll, a crowd of people could not possibly have failed to see them.