The (Kennedy) Age of Lost Innocence

I was the age of innocence.

I was just barely five years old and feeling elated as I skipped down the hilly road from Rose Tree Media Elementary School toward home.  My kindergarten teacher, Miss Espenshade, had just dismissed us unexpectedly and I was thrilled.

An upper classman derided me for being happy about it. “The president has been assassinated; it’s not something to be happy about.” I didn't know what that meant, but I knew it wasn't a good thing. It was a sobering moment and I remember it vividly.

When I got home, my mom was crying. The television was on. It hurt me to see my mother cry and it scared me. Walter Cronkite told us the president was dead. The nightmare had to be true if Walter Cronkite said it was so. Even he was crying, you could tell. The television stayed on for days. Words like ‘grassy knoll,’ 'Dealey Plaza,' ‘lone assassin,’ and ‘book depository’ became iconic words that weekend. ‘Kennedy, Oswald, Zapruder, and Jack Ruby’ were all names burned into my impressionable psyche. The ‘Magic Bullet Theory and the Warren Commission’ would soon follow.

Both of my parents were glued to the set. I saw Oswald shot and killed on live television. It played right out on live television. I remember my father shouting out an expletive. My father rarely cursed. I know my father and presumably my mother, had voted for Kennedy. It was the only time my father had ever voted for a democrat.

A few days after the assassination , again on television, I watched a widow with her babies, a daughter slightly older than myself, and her little boy, hand in hand, walking. A flag draped casket. Her son saluting as his father’s casket passed.

It was no longer the age of innocence, and neither was I.

I don’t know if President Kennedy was a great president, but he must have been doing something right.  I do know that the country was doing pretty well, and those who weren't doing great were doing better. My father was a Hispanic male, and living a relatively fat life in suburban Philadelphia in a district known for its superior schools. It was a life that I’m sure blew him away in contrast to his rough and tumble upbringing in the Marion section of Jersey City, NJ where he grew up as just another minority. My mother, a daughter of a successful Philadelphia architect, was already raising four children in a nice home on a nice block while still only in her twenties.  Growing up, I never identified myself as a minority because that was not how I thought of myself. My parents were college graduates in a neighborhood where none of my non-minority friends’ parents had educations. I went to great schools. Life was hopeful. In ’63, we all had a fighting chance.  I don’t think any generation since has had such a promising reality and horizon. My own children certainly have not had as promising a start in life as the time I was born into.

The music of Camelot was prominent in my childhood home. My parents took me to the play. I know every word of every song. The power in the title song, “Camelot”, instantly evokes melancholy and yet is so close, so close, to defining ideality. For a generation of people it’s the ‘go to song’ for 'what could have been' or for 'what once was.'

It’s been a fast fifty years. That day when my parents cried, when the country cried, that day is coming around again, for the fiftieth time. And this time might be the last time we look at it with such sharp focus. It is the fiftieth anniversary, a landmark year. Will it ever be looked at again with such scrutiny on say, year sixty three? Will as many people care in year sixty-three? I am among the youngest people who were alive on that day to have a conscious memory of that day, and the days that followed. Many of the grown-ups from that time have died. My father, who was only in his twenties when it happened, has been dead for over a decade. People of my age will be the last to have a living memory of that day. After we are gone, will the truth be told to a public who no longer has a vested interest in the truth?

Unlike Lincoln's assassination, we do have the benefit of the Zapruder film, and maybe that will help keep it a real and human event.

As providence would have it, my husband and I had a reason to go to Texas in late October, the October before the 50^th November. How could we go to Texas without going to Dallas? I had never been to Dallas before, but my husband had. He arranged for us to go to Dealey Plaza during our trip to Texas, and I can’t thank him enough for making it happen for me.

Being in the location where President Kennedy was shot was very familiar. I knew the layout. After fifty years in the media, I have seen every nook and cranny of the place. I instantly recognized the spot where Zapruder was standing while filming his infamous footage. Even without the white X on the highway, I could identify the location of the president’s car. The ‘grassy knoll’ was exactly as I knew it to be. The 6^th floor window of the school book depository was readily identifiable from the sidewalk.  The only thing that was in contrast to the video images that played in my mind was how small the space was. It was an intimate space, and not as expansive as it seems on television. When I drew the invisible line between the 6^th floor book depository window and the X marking the spot, it looked like a very doable shot. In contrast to everything I had ever believed, for a fleeting moment, it occurred to me that Oswald might have pulled the assassination off on his own. Being there was at the same time chilling and exciting.

At some point my husband and I wandered off in different directions to take photos. I am almost fanatical when I take photos, in avoiding tourists in a shot. I have waited hours on occasion to get the perfect shot without bystanders in it. Perhaps it’s because I carried a double major in photography and painting in Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, and have a good eye for composition, or maybe I’m just a snob. But unless I’m taking family photos or commemorating an experience with family and friends, or deliberately taking photos of people, I just don't want strangers in my scenic photographs.

 I stood on the sidewalk at the foot of the grassy knoll facing the wooden barricade and the white concrete structure known as the Bryan Colonnade, the birthplace of Dallas, and I snapped a photo. As I prepared to take the photo, I realized that a gentleman was descending the steps and entered into the frame, but I snapped it anyway. The man, realizing that he was in my photo, apologized for walking into the view as I was taking a photograph and offered to step aside so I could retake the shot. For the first time ever, it didn't bother me at all. In fact, I could hardly believe my own words as I said them,

 “That’s alright, I took it on purpose, I wanted a human element in this photo.”

What he told me next, blew my mind.

“Funny that you should say that”, he said. “I was here that day, and right about at this same spot the day the president was killed.”

My jaw visibly dropped. What are the odds of spontaneously meeting and engaging in conversation with someone who was there when it happened, and standing in the same general spot as where I took his photo? He said he had returned, close to the 50^th anniversary, to revisit the memories for himself. I was all ears, an eager audience of one, hungry to hear his memories and anything he was willing to share. I wish I had asked his name, and unfortunately I didn't, but for the sake of the rest of this story, I will refer to him as Bob.

Bob told me that he and his friends were behind the stockade fence, behind the grassy knoll, playing ball and running around. He was young, nine, and indifferent to the parade for the president, but he does remember certain things. He remembered there were men in suits behind the fence where he was playing. Lots of people were back there, looking over the fence without restriction. Bob also remembered that immediately before the president was shot, the overpass was closed to both cars and walking traffic, and there were men in suits on the bridge too. Bob went to Dealey Plaza with his mother that day to see the president, and as the president neared the plaza, his mother retrieved him to join her on the lawn across the street from the knoll to see the president as he passed. He heard the shots, and within seconds, everyone there agreed, something happened from behind the fence. Bob told me that to his dying day, no one will ever be able to convince him that the shots that killed the president didn't come from behind that fence beyond the knoll.

Bob told me that immediately after the president was shot, the bridge was immediately and oddly opened to everyone, cars and foot traffic alike. No one secured the location. And here's the most amazing thing of all, before he left the plaza with his mother, everyone knew there was a man named Oswald who worked at the book depository. 

“How can that be?” he asked me, “when today with all our technology, surveillance, and communication it takes us forever to know anything, but that day, almost instantly, everyone knew the name Oswald and that he worked at the book depository and that he had killed the president.”

This excellent point is what brought my mind right back to the conspiracy I grew up believing, which had been the common knowledge shared among those who had been alive that day. The intimacy of the plaza put the president in a turkey shoot. With open and non-secured windows everywhere, and barricaded fences perfect to hide behind, it was an assassin's paradise. Standing there, I could see that there were multiple easy perches for one or more assassin. 

After chatting with Bob for about twenty minutes I figured I should look for my husband and I reluctantly said goodbye to my Dealey Plaza friend .

My husband and I ended our day at the plaza by spending a few hours inside the Book Depository Museum. Interestingly, the immediate area surrounding the supposed assassin’s nest on the 6th floor is completely encased in Plexiglas. There is a little staged area with boxes near the window from which Oswald may or may not have taken a shot at the president. You can see the work elevator that Oswald would have used during his work day. The other floors and the stairwell were not open to the public.

The museum is a place with all kinds of media, reflections of the age of Camelot. If you weren't yet born in '63, the museum does an excellent job in transporting you back to that brief moment in time. If you were alive then, it will remind you of a few things you've forgotten. The commercials, the music, the news clips, it's all there to take you back.

After '63, it became easy to believe that our government could and probably did lie to us. I don't know what the truth is, but the fact that the records will remain sealed until 2063 is a strong indicator that something is fishy in Denmark. If the Warren Commission is the truth, as so many now believe, then why keep the documents classified top secret until 2063? 

Oswald was clearly a troubled loser and a loose cannon. It is easy to believe that he was probably involved. He is known to have lied and I believe he had a pretty good idea of what was going on in Dealey Plaza that day. He was the only employee of the book depository to high-tail it out of the building that day. He was not an innocent. He knew enough to figure out that he was the chosen one, the fall guy. In his own words, he knew he was set up as the patsy.

For the truth, follow the power. Who became president?  What did LBJ have on J Edgar Hoover that forced Hoover to demand that Kennedy choose LBJ as a running mate when it was known that Kennedy hated LBJ? And what did Hoover have on Kennedy that made Kennedy acquiesce on that point? If it wasn't LBJ behind the assassination, then what entity had the most to lose if Kennedy remained in office? Kennedy knew about, and stopped the CIA hit on Fidel Castro, and was considering disbanding the CIA. At least one member of the Warren Commission was CIA (Allen Dulles, former CIA head). Who worked in the CIA at that time who later cashed in his chips for his silence and became the 41st president? There is photographic evidence that our 41st president was in Dallas that same day standing in front of the School Book Depository. Besides the fingerprints of Oswald and other workers at the book depository, why were there also prints of a known hit-man (Mac Wallace, look it up) on the box by the 6th floor perch. And isn't it quite the small coincidence that Mac Wallace was a known associate of LBJ's at the time. Is this nonsense? Fifty years is a lot of time to let theories fester.

We need the truth already.