Dallas Greets President

...The calculation cost' John Kennedy his life, but it insures that people are always still there, shyly holding their cameras, as if waiting for someone famous who'll be by any minute...

...As Gordon Gray says, it could have been done "no muss, no fuss" while the car was still on Houston—that is, assuming there was somebody up on the Depository's sixth floor...

...The area seems to have been cordoned off, as if it were still a fresh crime scene, for more than a generation...

...The "Tex" was a play on "Textile" and "Texas," and inside one of the building's offices, Mr...

...The tour rolls on toward the abandoned Texas Theatre, where Oswald was arrested and whose marquee shows the faded outline of the sign for the movie playing there (CRY OF BATTLE) that afternoon...

...The ironies that began with one's entry to the building (a sign requests that weapons be checked) continue with such curiosities as the Dallas Times Herald editorial page from November 21 ("We believe both the world and John F. Kennedy will like what is seen here" ) and the most poignant one of all: the sketch done the following morning by the same paper's layout editor, in anticipation of the afternoon's press run...

...That the President was in a position to be murdered at all—slowly zig-zagging onto Houston and Elm instead of gliding down Main—probably involved another species of vanity, the political kind: Why even bother to remove the traffic barrier between Main and the Freeway if the President could receive an extra hundred smiles, wave to an extra hundred voters, by driving past the Plaza's buildings instead of between its stretches of grass...

...DO YOU RECOGNIZE SOMEONE WHO WAS IN DEALEY PLAZA THAT DAY...

...For sale: a volume by W. R. Morris and R. B. Cutler called Alek James Hidell, alias Oswald who died in an heroic attempt to save his President's life...

...32 The American Spectator December 1992 times...

...Kennedy the ordeal of returning to Dallas for the trial of her husband's murderer...

...Almost no one arrives without an opinion or theory, after all...

...This evenhandedness does not satisfy a great many of the people who pay $4.00 to come up here...

...The sign over the entrance promises NOT JUST QUESTIONS—ANSWERS...

...On a Saturday afternoon there are half a dozen men hawking JFK Today, a theory-filled newspaper that costs $3.00 and contains a buy-one-getone-free coupon for frozen yogurt available in the old Dal-Tex Building...

...points out how the Warren Commission has never been disproved, but notes that the "questions 'why?' and 'for or with whom?' are more difficult...

...The Chamber of Commerce has also sent business his way...

...She says it was nothing great," though not as beaten down as it is now...

...Even without prompting, one's own eyes will raise questions...

...A board with the heading "Who Did It...

...As the notes in the Visitors' Books say: we'll probably never know...

...CROWDS CHEER WILDLY FOR JFK...

...But, hey, "different strokes for different folks...

...The area had been devoted to criminal justice and history since the Old Dallas County Courthouse ("Old Red") came to the corner of Houston and Commerce in 1892...

...Abraham Zapruder's camera lay waiting to do one job during the same six seconds that Oswald's Mannlicher-Carcano rifle would be performing another...

...Bob confesses that looking at the picture leaves him "buggy-eyed," and that he doesn't buy everything they say about it...

...Tenth and Patton Streets, the site of the officer's killing, is only one of the stops the old white schoolbus makes on its pilgrimage through Dallas...

...An enormous photo blowup shows shelves and shelves of speculative books, and one wall lays out a series of possible conspiracies: "New Orleans Scenario," "The Far Right," "Organized Crime," etc...

...The audience listens attentively as someone not with the tour walks past on her way to take one more look at the fence--it's the woman who argued the other day with the security guard...

...allow yourself more time and the audible blend of life and death, the swirl of history, comes to seem exactly like memory...

...The land was acquired by the City of Dallas during the 1930s to create a major gateway to the city from the west, and to relieve traffic congestion at the Union terminal railroad tracks which passed north-south at the western edge of the city...

...on the way to What Is Now, JFK Airport"—wonders why people can't accept that a "lone nut job" did it...

...the western edge of downtown Dallas beneath the Union Terminal company tracks...

...Was it really so "impracticable" to reach the Stemmons Freeway from Main (as the Warren Report insists), or was the President sent into an ambush...

...Where was Oswald heading when he left his rooming house...

...And what about the curious path itself (what Bob calls "the little re-route job...

...One of these salesmen is young Gordon Gray, who declares, "I personally believe Eugene Brading shot him...

...the President jokes about being the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris as a reporter, from another speaker in the distance, shouts that "Oswald has been shot...

...Originally called the "Elm-Main-Commerce Subway," the gateway was conceived as a "triple underpass" of streets, which afforded access to...

...formed the Conspiracy...

...and still others, older ones, use the book to communicate with Kennedy himself: "We love you and miss you...

...71 The American Spectator December 1992 33...

...Everything familiar to him from three decades of films and photographs and re-enactments is where it should be: the pointless white pergolas still stand on the grass...

...Some people express the belief that we'll never know the truth...

...In fact, the area is so nearly the same as it was thirty years ago that a first-time visitor will walk around as if in a dream...

...and a bearded, professorial fellow who is sufficiently knowledgeable to prompt Bob whenever he blanks out: it was Ken O'Donnell to whom JFK remarked on the ease with which someone could kill him, and Robert MacNeil who breathlessly asked Lee Harvey Oswald where he could find a phone as Oswald exited the Depository a few minutes after the assassination...

...This old frame house looks barely habitable, but a skinny fellow who lives in it is out back working on his car radio...

...What he says of Oswald's second murder is in keeping with the Center's ecumenicalism: "I respect everybody's opinion on the Tippit case...

...JACKIE SPARKLES, LADYBIRD TOO...

...B ob Kintzle, who drives and guides the bus tour that leaves each day from the Center, is a husky-voiced, friendly suburban fellow, well-informed and hospitable...

...Three items were slated to run under a photo: SECURITY BOYS PLAY IT COOL...

...jokes Bob after we've crossed the Trinity River into the rundown Oak Cliff section of Dallas...

...Once there, Bob takes you to the grass between Elmand Main, the spot where Mary Moorman took the photo of Kennedy slumping into his wife's arms, a photo that, when enhanced, many "researchers" believe, shows a man across the way, behind the stockade fence, firing at the President...

...To Bob, who talks of helping out on "Oliver's movie," the assassin is always "Lee," his killer "Jack...

...From here it's on to 214 Neely Street, where Oswald posed in the backyard with his rifle (the famous "faked" photo...

...Expressions of faith in the Warren Report are rare, though one man who says he saw Kennedy three times—"The Last in Sept...

...She means that they don't show frame 313 of the Zapruder film, a complaint she takes to a security guard downstairs, who explains, to herincomplete satisfaction, that that portion of the film was considered inappropriate for children...

...0 n Sunday morning, November 24, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald died doing what many capital criminals are unable to resist: he was returning to the scene of his crime...

...Just tell the TRUTH...

...and also, through the window on his left, at the Dal-Tex Building...

...sits the JFK Assassination Information Center, whose patrons include Oliver Stone, Kevin Costner, and some dissenting eyewitnesses to the crime...

...We're heading into nut country...

...But in the researchers' world, where all coincidence is sinister, where all improbability and irony must give way to evident design, the answer to every question is a scary, whispered yes...

...The fading is not from 1963 but 1991, when Oliver Stone put the letters back on the marquee...

...Was Oswald on his way to see Ruby...

...He knows Jim Leavelle, one of the cops holding on to Oswald when Ruby shot him, as well as a couple of Jack's girls, who tell him they saw Lee and Jack together a number of "Somebody want to rent a room...

...Near Oswald's corner window the ABC Radio bulletin about shots being fired at the motorcade plays over and over from a tiny speaker, its words joining those coming from the videotape players near each of the main exhibits, quick loops that visitors can activate by pushing a button...

...up there...

...He's out here six days a week, giving good value for the $19 price, and when he drops everyone back in the West End there's a hearty round of applause for his efforts...

...One doubt, or just peculiar thought, that Bob Kintzle puts in your head involves something observable from the tour...

...Oliver Stone hit it on the DOT...

...Why did he wait for the limousine to make its 120-degree turn on to Elm Street before firing, over the trees, from behind...

...Dallas County finally acquired it, and today the structure is perhaps the most startling example of "mixed-use" architecture in urban America...

...He says the tour bus doesn't bother him at all...

...As those nominating Dealey Plaza for the National Register of Historic Places described it on their application in 1991: This generally rectangular approximately 3-acre park was formed in 1934-40 from several blocks of Dallas founder John Neely Bryan's original land grant...

...6 6 omebody want to rent a room...

...The ride begins with the last mile and a half of the motorcade route, and as the bus travels down Main a video up front plays an old David L. Wolper documentary showing President Kennedy traveling the street on the day of the murder, so you enter the Plaza more or less as he does...

...This isn't a very honest exhibit," says one woman to somebody perusing the books...

...asks a woman of the clerk...

...beams exposed overhead—and a visitor can walk around, imagining Oswald not only at the hour of the killing but also in the weeks he went about his ordinary business...

...The result is a strange polyphony: the "Vote for Kennedy" jingle from 1960 mixes on the air with Taps...

...he keeps a cooler full of free soda at the front of the bus and, unlike the managers of The Sixth Floor, encourages picture-taking...

...Above Musicland and Antique Angle and the Texas T-Shirt Co...

...the Union Pacific trains clatter near the overpass whose shade Mrs...

...Oswald's sniper's nest, as well as the corner opposite, where his rifle was found, have been glassed off and replicated with Scott, Foresman textbook cartons stacked in the configuration they made in police photos on November 22, 1963...

...But instead of grade-school readers and math texts, the bulk of the floor is now filled with exhibits on Kennedy's presidency and death...

...Looking down from the sixth floor onto Houston Street, as the motorcade approached...

...We know the U.S...

...the traffic flows in the same pattern...

...What the President is supposed to have said in approaching his life's final The American Spectator December 1992 31 destination comes to mind when you're on the third floor of the West End Marketplace, in the old warehouse district (now restored and boutiqued) a couple of blocks from the Depository...

...bricked...

...Gordon has never been up to the Sixth Floor museum, but one of his colleagues asks if it doesn't seem "a little Warren Commission–oriented"—and isn't the curator, Ms...

...It would instead be Ruby who spent the last three years of his life in a cell above the Plaza...

...As far as the Dallas police go, they've continued their tradition of hospitality toward the purveyors of live entertainment: Bob says they've been very good to him with permits since he put the tour together a year and a half ago...

...Here a visitor can see frame 313 over and over, to his heart's content, on a monitor above a "Schematic Model Showing The Ridiculous `Single Bullet Theory.' " At the souvenir stand he can purchase any number of books and videos on the assassination or just a deck of "Coup d'Etat" playing cards...

...Our last stop is the ramp down which Jack walked into the Dallas police station to shoot Lee...

...THE JFK ASSASSINATION INFORMATION CENTER WOULD LIKE TO KNOW...

...Not until Kennedy turned the corner and showed only the back of his head, making the deed more like an aerial bombing than a shooting...

...In the parking lot (unpaved in '63) behind the fence (much of it still intact) Bob tells his audience about the suspicious things seen here by Lee Bowers, the "tower man" working the railroad switching system that morning...

...The President would have been more aware of Dealey's son, Ted, who had taken the paper to the far right and, in 1961, at a meeting of Kennedy and Texas publishers, declared: "We need a man on horseback to lead this nation, and The American Spectator December 1992 29 many people in Texas and the Southwest think you are riding on Caroline's tricycle...

...His journey was, of course, involuntary, but most of the millions who witnessed its fatal disruption by Jack Ruby never realized that the Dallas County jail to which Oswald was being transferred occupied the top floors of the Criminal Courts Building in Dealey Plaza and afforded a splendid view of the spot where forty-eight hours earlier he had murdered President John F. Kennedy...

...Truly enough to hire Lee Oswald at the Book Depository thirty years ago, sells about a hundred papers a day but cheerfully admits that the other fellows do much better...

...In short, what made Oswald do what he did the way he did it was probably the same thing—a burst of sentimentality—that made Jack Ruby do what he did on Sunday morning: he would be the man, the hero, who spared Mrs...

...63 When He Rode in An Open Car in Forest Hills, Queens-N.Y...

...jokes Bob after we've crossed the Trinity River into the rundown Oak Cliff section of Dallas...

...The real purpose is to dig the black hole ever deeper, to perpetuate the event as one would the Crucifixion (the wooden door to Jack Ruby's apartment is displayed as a relic) and to proliferate theories with the kind of "non-judgmental" collegiality one finds at a Unitarian supper...

...You could have driven out of here at ten that night with a bazooka in your trunk...

...After all, Bob can answer a question about whether Oak Cliff was always this shabby by saying, "I talked to Marina about it...

...The area still looks like a warehouse—gray...

...At noontime on Friday, November 22, as he waited for the President's limousine to come down Houston Street and turn onto Elm, Oswald may have spent a moment regarding the building in which he knew he would soon be jailed and Thomas Mallon's collection of essays on American "spectacles," Rockets and Rodeos, will be published in January by Ticknor & Fields...

...By the 1970s the TSBD (a private brokerage company, not a state agency) had left, and the building was besieged by debt, disrepair, and an arsonist...

...About a year ago Bob had a gun pulled on him when he led a tour party into the theater and inadvertently walked into the middle of a drug deal...

...It was here that, shortly after the assassination, Oswald picked up his pistol, perhaps after realizing, according to Bob, that he'd been "stood up for the prom" and that he was "it": the patsy...

...What they call the fatal head shot isn't the fatal head shot...

...His clipboard with three unfilled orders was not found on the floor until ten days after the assassination...

...The building at 411 Elm Street had been constructed for the Southern Rock Island Plow Company in 1901 and was leased to the Depository some years before the assassination...

...Brading had Mafia ties, knew the eyebrowless David Ferrie, and was in the Dal-Tex building supposedly looking for a phone at the time of the assassination...

...Kennedy said she was looking forward to as an escape from the noontime heat...

...T he Dallas County Administration expanded Dealey Plaza's civic functions by locating itself there in 1981 in what was once the Texas School Book Depository...

...Lyndon Johnson, riding two cars behind Kennedy, would have been well aware of the Plaza, because he had helped to build it...

...Oswald had a clear shot at Kennedy, so why didn't he take it...

...Jack's old apartment is now a battered dump, the pool overgrown with weeds ("South Fork this place isn't," says Bob), in a neighborhood where landlords advertise "Special Rates—No Drugs...

...The Plaza replaced residential and commercial buildings on the tract...

...He could hardly have avoided looking over to the Annex of the Dallas County Records Building either, where a number of certificates resulting from his action would soon have to be filed...

...Oswald may have given a signal from the doorway of the Depository...

...The final effect is haunting, and you realize that what first seemed to be clumsiness is actually a brilliant curatorial stroke...

...Conover Hunt, related to the notorious H. L. Hunt oil family...

...Sure enough, there are still "Bedrooms for Rent" at Oswald's old rooming house at 1026 N. Beckley...

...As the local government goes about its business on the lower floors, a stream of tourists moves overhead, reliving the assassination in a museum run by the Dallas County Historical Foundation and called The Sixth Floor...

...The decor of the exhibit areas eschews the warehouse gray of The Sixth Floor in favor of a bold red, white, and blue...

...Oswald is in heaven...

...Displays on his "Economic and Social Programs," "The Red Threat," "The Space Race," and so forth precede ones concerning the assassination itself...

...Back out on Elm Street, if she stops to look at the historical plaque on the building, she may take comfort from the last sentence, in which the word ALLEGEDLY, after the name Lee Harvey Oswald, has been rubbed to a bright silver by those who share her suspicions...

...For your consideration: a photo of witnesses on the grassy knoll...

...It was on the Kennedys' left as they drove into the Plaza, across from a bronze statue of the man for whom the square was named, George Bannerman Dealey, the philanthropic publisher of the Dallas Morning News...

...The only thing to jar the eye, sticking up to the southwest, about a quarter of a mile away, is the Hyatt Reunion Hotel and Tower, a great glassy complex whose construction during the 1970s, according to the NRHP Registration Form, unearthed the "remains of a woolly mammoth...

...Across the street from it, written in faded paint on the pavement beside a boarded-up locksmith's, is the graffito: "The one truth is that Lee Harvey answered GOD's order to blow off JFK's head...

...The Visitors' Books record much praise for the exhibits, but also the frequent feeling of being conned ("Nice Museum—Too Bad it can't contain all the Truth" ). There are calls to "Open the Files...

...Bob's customers one Sunday afternoon include a vacationing family ("Wait for Grandma...

...A large section is devoted to "The Investigations," and along with the Warren Commission there are displays on the Rockefeller Commission (1975), the Church Committee (1976), and the House Select Committee on Assassinations (1976-1978...

...The same application states that the area "retains a very high level of historic integrity...

...The familiarity seems more natural than presumptuous...

...Sure enough, there are still "Bedrooms for Rent" at Oswald's old rooming house at 1026 N. Beckley...

...others recall where they were when they heard the news...

...More or less between 1026 N. Beckley and Ruby's own Oak Cliff apartment sits the point at which Oswald killed Officer Tippit...

...The answers to these questions are probably more simple and human than "research" will allow...

...30 The American Spectator December 1992 T he museum's location embraces the premise that Oswald killed Kennedy, but the exhibits are hardly dogmatic...

...but a visitor soon realizes that the Center's business is not to "get to the bottom of this case once and for all" (the words in its Statement of Purpose...

...an unaccompanied man on holiday who asks in a British accent if someone will take his picture at the triple underpass...

...Probably no part of downtown Dallas has changed less in that time...

...If you spend only ten minutes on the floor, the result is discordance...

...Kennedy climbed out of the car to avoid being killed...

...tried...

...One nicely dressed group of people in their thirties, who would be standing respectfully mute if they were in the Dallas Museum of Art, here earnestly discuss, as one of them vigorously taps a photograph, how Mrs...

...The motorcade route was changed at the last minute for better triangulation and to keep Jackie out of harm's way...

...Out on Elm Street, on the "grassy knoll" beneath the Depository, visitors concern themselves not so much with the sixth floor as the sixth stripe, the white traffic line Kennedy's limousine was riding over as the fatal shot was fired...

...Along with Brading, he thinks, two other teams of assassins helped fire a total of five shots...

...Shooting Kennedy in the face would actually have involved plenty of "muss," and it's not too farfetched to suppose that Oswald, a colossally conflicted boy, looked through his telescopic sight at Kennedy, smiling broadly, and could not bring himself to pull the trigger...

...Do you have anything that has quite a few pictures of Lee Harvey in it...

...One old man who's out here nearly every day hustling for change says he saw the whole thing, that the shot came from the front: when he asks where you're from and you say New York, he exclaims fondly about how John-John now works for the D.A...

...Who decided on that awkward turn instead of just having the motorcade continue through the Plaza via Main Street...

...As the local government goes about its business on the lower floors, a stream of tourists moves overhead, reliving the assassination in a museum run by the Dallas County Historical Foundation and called The Sixth Floor...

...They did not check trunks...

...The WPA and the Texas Youth Administration, which Johnson headed in the mid-1930s, undertook the project together...

...Gordon, who has the polite yes-sir, no-sir manners that impressed Mr...