(A woman named Moorman took this Polaroid image at the precise moment between the shots that killed the President. The Grassy Knoll is in the background. Photo Bettman Archive).
It is snowing some places in this great country. It is not here, a small consideration as the beginning of the Holidays is upon us. But for this day, it is always going to be 1963, and it will run in the back of our national memory forever. I described the moment I heard the news yesterday. It is frozen in amber, sepia-toned now.
Strangely, the tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches that Mom was serving at the instant that Jack Ruby advanced on the Deranged Lone Gunman and blew holes in him are just as vivid, fused together in real life color and pure black and white.
(This color image shows the Polaroid shot being taken by Ms Moorman in the blue raincoat. I can’t even look at this without thinking of the Umbrella Man under his deployed rain protection on that sunny day. Photo Sixth Floor Museum).
The radio is replaying the events of this day, fifty years ago, and it is tempting to jump through the wormhole of time. I had a mild brush with it this morning- I was trying to confirm a small but significant fact about some aspect of the horrific event as claimed by a character named Josiah “Tink” Thompson. Interesting guy- he graduated from Yale in 1957, did a hitch as a UDT swimmer for the Navy and after that returned to Yale to get his Doctorate in Kierkegaardian Philosophy.
Then he dropped out to become a private gumshoe and worked on more than a hundred homicides.
The thing I like about his approach is that there are no space aliens, or complex tampering with the Zapruder film or crap like that. He says there is plenty of other imagery of the Plaza that day to connect the dots, and that it is a pretty comprehensive record of what happened. It is worth a listen, and I think it sums up just about what I think and no more.
(New Orleans DA Big Jim Garrison. Photo Wikipedia).
The endless repetition of the horror doesn’t seem to deter the morbid curiosity, since things continue to trickle out. My pal Boats wrote from the Crescent City to remind me of the circus that attended the Jim Garrison investigation and trial of Clay Shaw.
No, I thought. I can’t do that. No more conspiracy theories- and that one was so over-the-top that it seemed like a freak show at the time. It had everything, if you go back and review it; homosexuals, CIA anti-Castro freaks and the mob.
Then, attempting to recall some of the wilder elements of the Oliver Stone hallucination film JFK, I got sucked down another wormhole with the revelation that the tapes of the radio communications from Air Force One that day were just transcribed and released.
Between reality and hallucination, the morning has passed. The third iteration of NPR is rolling over me again- the priest called in to give Last Rites to the president, the ambulance attendants, all of the madness creeping out of the background with those larger than life old timers: LBJ, McGeorge Bundy, the White House Sit Room…
(Open session of the HSCA. Photo AP).
Nope. I can’t do it. I can’t even make a coherent narrative out of it. Congress tried to make sense out of all the theories when it established the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1976- but the proceedings were held mostly in closed session, and did little to quell dissatisfaction with the results of the Warren Commission.
In 1992, Congress passed legislation to collect and open up all the evidence relating to Kennedy’s death, and created the Assassination Records Review Board to put out what information it deemed appropriate. There is still classified material. Why there would be at this late date is beyond me.
As Tink Thompson observes, this has gone into the history books not only as a tragic moment, but a complete mess. I am going to go back to thinking about other things. There are enough disasters in progress to occupy our limited attention span, I think.
But as I contended yesterday, this single event is the central mystery of American history, with Jack and Jackie and the kids and Marylin and Bobbie and Lyndon and Lee and Ruby and Curtis LeMay all now playing their roles, explicit and ambiguous, forever, endless loop.
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303