Why Special Remembrances Of JFK's Assassination Are Both Too Much And Not Enough

It will be an anniversary draped in black crêpe and ribboned with old newsreels, a day of somber re-appraisals by the usual bores and lurid speculations by the usual loons. But beneath the cacophony, not all of it generated by Chris Matthews’s yap, will rest the severed feeling of irretrievable, inexplicable loss. Fifty years ago, on November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated riding in a motorcade cruising through Dallas’s Dealey Plaza, the top of his head torn off by a rifle shot fired from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, his brain matter spilling into the lap of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, whose pink suit and pillbox hat colorize our memories of a noir nightmare unfolding under a noonday sun. Like the bombing of Pearl Harbor, in 1941, and the destruction of the Twin Towers, in 2001, J.F.K.’s assassination was one of those unifying, defining moments when everyone alive remembers where they were when the news struck, shattering the glass wall separating before and after. I was in the sixth grade, a member of the safety patrol, with a white sash and official-looking badge: I remember the light at the end of the school hallway reflecting off the floor as word went round and the weight in the air the days after. For kids my age, it was like losing a father, a father who had all of our motley fates in his hands. (During the Cuban missile crisis, of 1962, a lot of us grade-schoolers thought we might be goners, our Twilight Zone atomic nightmares about to come true.)

In those big-three-network days (ABC, CBS, NBC), television was broadcast mostly in black and white, and the images of the coverage that followedâ€"the riderless horse, John-John’s salute as his father’s casket went by, Jacqueline Kennedy’s mourning veil (which Andy Warhol would multiply into a silkscreen montage, deifying her as a widow Madonna)â€"bled into our consciousness like irremovable ink. A deluge of memoirs, biographies, photo albums, magazine special editions, political reconsiderations, pulpy reconstructions (Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Kennedy), tales of Camelot romance, and pantie-sniffing scandal trawls have followed ever since, a perpetual cottage industry of Kennedyiana, building to November’s golden-anniversary publishing crescendo.

Among the titles about to rumble down the lumber chute are docudrama-paced ticktocks of the assassination and its frantic aftermath (The President Has Been Shot!, by James L. Swanson, Dallas 1963, by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis, Five Days in November, by former Secret Service agent Clint Hill, who leapt into action after J.F.K. was hit, We Were There: Revelations from the Dallas Doctors Who Attended to JFK on November 22, 1963, by Allen Childs, M.D.); a pair of more extended countdowns on the calendar (JFK’s Last Hundred Days, by Thurston Clarke, These Few Precious Days: The Final Year of Jack with Jackie, by Christopher Andersen); an overarching, scale-of-justice appraisal of the Kennedy legacy (The Kennedy Half Century, by Larry J. Sabato); an inside-baseball examination of the Kennedy team (Camelot’s Court: Inside the Kennedy White House, by Robert Dallek); an ideological recasting of J.F.K. into Reaganesque drag (JFK, Conservative, by Ira Stoll); a volume of J.F.K.’s letters, edited by Martin W. Sandler (The Letters of John F. Kennedy); a what-might-have-been reverie (If Kennedy Livedâ€"The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: An Alternate History, by Jeff Greenfield); and a crossfire of j’accuse fingers pointing every which way at the alleged guilty parties who plotted the president’s death (CIA Rogues and the Killing of the Kennedys: How and Why U.S. Agents Conspired to Assassinate JFK and RFK, by Patrick Nolan, The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ, by political trickster Roger Stone and Mike Colapietro, a couple of exploitators bearing Jesse Ventura’s paw prints); a deep probe into the sketchy backstory of the triggerman (The Interloper: Lee Harvey Oswald Inside the Soviet Union, by Peter Savodnik); and, for those who like to read by the fireplace with a faithful hound at their feet, there’s Top Down: A Novel of the Kennedy Assassination, by Jim Lehrer, former anchor of the PBS NewsHour. E-books galore, too, such as Edward Jay Epstein’s fascinating, star-studded, and spook-haunted Assassination Diary, which provides the backstage story to Epstein’s investigative odyssey in the reporting of his Assassination Chronicles trilogyâ€"Inquest, Counterplot, and Legendâ€"which features a cast that includes New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison (a loose cannon who would be sanitized and sanctified into the quixotic hero of Oliver Stone’s JFK), Hannah Arendt, spymaster James Jesus Angleton, Norman Mailer, Gerald Ford, and, in a sheer nightgown atop a ladder, actress Pamela Tiffin.

It’s too much and it’s not enough. It will never be enough. Readers will never be sated, because too many hidden dimensions and murky links remain, an atticful of unanswered (and unanswerable) questions, hints of the possible future of which we were robbed. History left us hanging. We will never know the full measure of what was taken from us that day in Dallas, whether J.F.K. would have won a landslide against rock-jawed Barry Goldwater in 1964 that would have given him an F.D.R.-size mandate or if, as his successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, did, he would have deepened U.S. involvement in Vietnam and sunk hundreds of thousands of lives into the quagmire. The whiplash trauma of J.F.K.’s death was so transformative that it’s maddening that the perpetrator should be such a piddling figure. It offends our sense of proportionâ€"the Shakespearean scale of the fall of kingsâ€"that a president of Kennedy’s ruddy vitality and mental crackle could be brought down by a sullen sloucher named Lee Harvey Oswald, whose photographs suggest a runty version of Ryan Gosling after being smacked around, and who in turn was rubbed out while in the custody of the Dallas police by a local hustler and seedy glory-hunter named Jack Ruby, enabling Oswald to take his secrets with him to the morgue slab. No wonder 50 crazed years later suspicions still flourish and theories abound that there had to be bigger puppeteers operating behind the Manchurian Candidate curtains who set up these patsies as fall guys: L.B.J., the C.I.A., the K.G.B., disloyal factions within the Secret Service, the Mafia, Fidel Castro, the gargoyle shadow government later personified by the Smoking Man in The X-Filesâ€"pick a perp. Most daringly, perhaps, Mark Shaw points the bony finger of recrimination at J.F.K.’s own father in The Poison Patriarch: How the Betrayals of Joseph P. Kennedy Caused the Assassination of JFK.

“It was so hot, we turned the corner and I saw the underpass and thought, Oh, good, it will be cool for a few minutes, then I heard the shot, the first one.”
â€"Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, quoted in American Lady: The Life of Susan Mary Alsop, by Caroline de Margerie.

Rendezvous with destiny always look neat in retrospectâ€"preordained by the godsâ€"and the drive into Dallas forever unfurls like the fulfillment of some prophetic curse, the chronicle of a death foretold, its victim-protagonist the most mortality-haunted of our modern presidents. Jack Kennedy nearly died of scarlet fever at the age of two; he lost his brother Joe junior in World War II; he almost lost his own life as a lieutenant when his boat, PT-109, was rammed by a Japanese destroyer (his heroics on behalf of his surviving crew were immortalized by the journalist John Hersey and still make enthralling reading, no matter how cynical you think you are); his sister Kathleen died in a plane crash in 1948; he was given last rites on three separate occasions; he had Addison’s disease, which he assumed would end his life early; he and Jacqueline had a daughter who was stillborn and a son, Patrick, who died after a few days from what’s now called infant respiratory-distress syndrome; he not only brooded about being in the crosshairs, about how easy it would be for any nut with a gun to penetrate security, but acted out his murder in a macabre skit in September of 1963 that left him collapsed on a private pier at Hammersmith Farm, in Newport, Rhode Island, tomato juice or ketchup substituting for blood, Jackie and a posh friend stepping over his prone body as if it were a speed bump. Executive decapitation was in the crisp air. With the eerie clairvoyance that is the providence of mass culture and its mutant antenna, the director Don Siegel filmed a remake of Hemingway’s The Killers in 1963 that featured a high-angle, zoom-in sniper scene that looked like a trial run of Lee Harvey Oswald’s marksmanship. (Cast member Angie Dickinson, a friend and reputed gal pal of the president’s, got word of the assassination during production.)