JFK death still grabs at national psyche

By Deborah Sharp
USA Today

DALLAS — Even after four decades, 2.2 million people a year trek to Dealey Plaza to stand where John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated. Scores of them likely have encountered a fast-talking Jimmy Longoria.

Even Americans not yet born in 1963 seem to revere John F. Kennedy. Advertiser library photo • Nov. 2, 1962

The seemingly boundless fascination with the life and death of the 35th American president has been good for Longoria's business. In case you missed this week's coverage on just about every TV network except ESPN, Saturday marks the 40th anniversary of the assassination.

The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks two years ago may have eclipsed Kennedy's death for the magnitude of horror and fear, creating a "where were you when it happened" moment for a new generation. But there seems to be no slowing the human stream flowing over Dealey Plaza.

As cameras click, Longoria points up to the sixth-floor sniper's nest where Lee Harvey Oswald was alleged to have fired, the grassy knoll where conspiracy buffs maintain at least one more gunman stood, the exact spot on Elm Street where the presidential motorcade was that sunny day at 12:30 p.m. Dallas time.

"I'm not saying all my facts are true," said Longoria, 36, whose assassination spiel involving the father of a well-known actor and a shadowy government conspiracy certainly seems creative. "It was a murder that was never solved. People are still interested."

That part, at least, is irrefutably true. Interest in JFK has held for almost a half-century, despite revelations about the man and his presidency that might have sunk a living politician. Serial adultery. Heavy drug use for medical problems. The taint of a vote-fixing scandal. None of it seems to have shattered the "Camelot" image — the notion that Kennedy, with his beautiful young wife, swept into the White House on a wave of glamour and good intentions to rival King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

His 1,000-day presidency included achievements: championing civil rights. The space program. Facing down the Soviets over the Cuban missile crisis and averting nuclear war. And missteps: escalation in Vietnam. The Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba.

But in the end, the political scorecard seems beside the point. Like Elvis, Kennedy has become bigger in death than in life. Polls show Americans, especially baby boomers, consistently rank him as one of the country's greatest presidents, neck-and-neck with Abraham Lincoln. Historians place him closer to the middle.

The young also hooked

Younger people tend to rate higher the presidents they remember. But even those who were not alive when Oswald took aim from the right corner window of the Texas School Book Depository are not immune to the mystique. Three-quarters of those ages 18 to 29 say they approve of Kennedy as a person, the highest rating given by any age group in a USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll last weekend.

Two-thirds of visitors to the depository building, now the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, were born after Kennedy's death, the same ratio as in the population at large. About 97 million Americans are old enough to remember the assassination — at least 45 years old. Almost double that number — 184 million — are younger, according to the Census.

"For those who were alive, this is a place to come to remember what they were feeling, to seek some kind of emotional solace. For the two-thirds born afterward, it remains a mystery, a whodunit. It's something they're intrigued by," said Jeff West, 45, executive director of the Sixth Floor Museum, which will count a half-million visitors this year, up from 10,000 when it opened in 1989.

Historians say future anniversaries of Kennedy's death could be less emotional. In a decade, fewer people who were involved will be alive for interviews. A decade after that, fewer people who can remember will be alive. And so on. The same is happening with D-Day and Pearl Harbor; the same happened with Lincoln's assassination and the Civil War.

"Time does its work," said Lewis Gould, a historian from Austin and author of "The Modern American Presidency."

Unlike the vendors hawking autopsy photos on the street below, the Sixth Floor Museum provides a scrupulously historic approach to Kennedy's presidency and the assassination theories. Most mainstream historians believe Oswald acted alone. But there are credible dissenters. And the public overwhelmingly believes otherwise — influenced perhaps by piles of books, TV shows and movies such as Oliver Stone's conspiracy-themed "JFK" in 1991. Posters for that film carry the tag line: "The Story That Won't Go Away." It seems like an apt assessment.

After numerous government probes, the Justice Department finally closed the Kennedy investigation in 1988. The finding: no persuasive evidence of a conspiracy.

Even so, three-quarters of Americans believe Oswald did not act alone, according to a Gallup Poll taken Nov. 10 to 12. That's down slightly from 81 percent in 2001, but still a big jump over the first time Gallup asked the question, in 1963, when 52 percent of Americans believed others besides Oswald conspired in the killing.

"It's been very difficult for people to believe that someone as inconsequential as Oswald could have killed someone as consequential as Kennedy," said Boston University historian Robert Dallek, author of the JFK book "An Unfinished Life," who believes Oswald was the lone assassin.

Less than an hour after Kennedy was pronounced dead at 1 p.m., Oswald was captured. Two days later, Jack Ruby killed the suspected triggerman during a jail transfer. That shooting was caught on live TV, and the photograph became a cultural icon.

Timothy Crawford, 55, a lawyer from Racine, Wis., doesn't buy it: "Oswald was a classic CIA patsy," he said, standing on the grassy knoll during a tour of Dealey Plaza.

Lois Byrd, 60, from Columbus, Ga., disagrees. She was a great admirer of Kennedy and mourned him like others of her generation. But she believes Oswald acted alone. "This was something a disturbed man decided to do," she said.

Now the pilgrims come from all over the country and the world to trudge across Dealey Plaza, a landscaped intersection of downtown streets once better known as Dallas' western gateway.

Blaming Dallas

The city took a long time formally to recognize the site of JFK's death. Dallas was bruised by its negative image after the assassination: 80 percent of Americans then blamed the city for the crime. Long-distance operators refused to connect calls for residents. Highway toll takers tossed back the coins of drivers with Dallas tags. City Hall received reams of hate mail.

Dallas was politically conservative and voted Republican. Residents nonetheless turned out in droves for the Democratic president's visit. About 250,000 people gathered to watch the motorcade.

The last words JFK likely heard: "Mr. President, you can't say Dallas doesn't love you!" Nellie Connally had leaned in close to utter those encouraging words to Kennedy seconds before the shots rang out. She was riding in the president's car with her husband, John, the Texas governor, who was hit and nearly bled to death before the limo reached Parkland Hospital. But the governor survived.

As the limo's last surviving passenger, Nellie Connally, now 84, recently published a book, "From Love Field: Our Final Hours with President John F. Kennedy," adding her own take to the pantheon of tomes about JFK. Keith Shelton of Denton, Texas, rode in a press bus as a Dallas Times Herald reporter in the presidential motorcade that day. He clearly remembers hearing the three shots that changed history.

He says the assassination was devastating, different from the national mourning for the victims of Sept. 11. In his view, the terrorist attacks heightened our own sense of vulnerability, while Kennedy's death was like seeing a loved one killed. "There was an emotional attachment," said Shelton, 71. "The whole country knew the Kennedys."

In 1970, Dallas built a memorial to Kennedy, not in Dealey Plaza, but two blocks away. The Sixth Floor Museum opened in 1989, only after the historic book depository building was saved from destruction. And Dealey Plaza was named a National Historic Landmark in 1993, three decades after the assassination.

Those with a taste for the macabre can indulge it easily at Dealey Plaza. In addition to autopsy photos complete with bullet holes, there's a tour in a mock presidential limo and a ready supply of conspiracy buffs willing to show off their pictures of Kennedy's head wound in gruesome color.

"There's always been a necrophiliac atmosphere to this, a sort of profiting from death," said Texas historian Gould, 64. He quotes writer H.L. Mencken: "No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public."

For 11 years, two to three days a week, Don Miller, 55, has set out his conspiracy evidence on Dealey Plaza. He has an easel with diagrams and bullet paths. He has an old Compaq computer with an endless loop of findings from his self-published pamphlet, "The Question Mark." And he has a steady supply of tourists, still fascinated with JFK. "Everybody has a zoo," Miller said of other cities, "but there's only one (JFK) assassination."

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