Totally Texas -- The long view from a corner window

The Sixth Floor Museum

411 Elm St., Dallas

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It’s a perfect, clear November afternoon in Dallas and I’m looking down on the street from a corner window high in the former Texas School Book Depository. But it’s a window on the seventh floor, not the sixth floor. Not the window where young depository employee Lee Harvey Oswald left a clipboard of orders unfilled as he ran downstairs after the passage of President John F. Kennedy’s convertible on a similar afternoon nearly fifty years ago.

And I’m not trying to make a twisted version of history, watching the bystanders across the street in Dealey Plaza. (Although a security guard keeps discreet watch over the few visitors to The Sixth Floor Museum who venture up to this nearly-empty seventh floor.)

I’ve come up the stair from the crowded main exhibit hall, displaying some of the 40,000 items the museum has collected relating to Kennedy’s assassination and its aftermath, as well as cultural artifacts of the Kennedy family, administration, and 1960’s culture. Even more exhibits seem to have been added since I visited the museum in 2011. Surely the president’s unused luncheon setting, from the banquet at nearby Dallas Trade Center he was en route to, wasn’t there on my earlier visit.

Neither, if I remember, was the Neiman Marcus suit Dallas police detective Jim Leavelle wore for what he knew would be his photo-op of a lifetime, escorting accused assassin Oswald from Dallas Police Headquarters in front of a mob of journalists. Leavelle and his suit survived the day. Oswald, shot by local nightclub owner Jack Ruby, did not.

But the centerpieces of the museum, film of Kennedy’s triumphant trip down Main Street, the cars speeding away after the firing of shots, the coffin lying in state with its covering flag kissed by his calm--if still slightly dazed-looking--widow, Jacqueline, are still there.
Still stirring emotions fifty years later.

Because of intense public interest as the assassination anniversary nears, The Sixth Floor Museum has extended its hours this month and instituted a timed entry system. Hours through the end of November are 9 a.m. - 7 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays, noon - 7 p.m. Mondays. On November 22, the museum will delay opening until 3 p.m. and remain open until 8 p.m. because of anticipated crowds in Dealey Plaza and elsewhere around the city while Dallas holds an official commemoration.

Tickets are $16 for adults, $13 for children under age six. I bought a ticket online, which can be done up to two hours in advance of the designated entry time. Parking at the museum’s lot is $5, but the museum entry is within a few blocks from both the West End and Union Station DART stops. And while you’re in the museum, visit the seventh floor as well, for artist Alex Guofeng Cao’s pixilated portraits of Jack and Jacqueline Kennedy. And for a moment to look quietly out the window.
For more information, related events, or to buy tickets, see the museum’s site,
www.jfk.org/.

For more assassination-related posts at this site see “Shots still echoing,” Nov. 14, 2011; “Stephen King on changing history,” Nov. 16, 2011; “The face that drove Oswald to kill,” Sept. 16, 2013; “Dallas dead, the famed & the infamous,” October 25, 2013; “Countdown to a tragedy remembered,” Nov. 1, 2013; and “JFK sites in Dallas, 50 years later,” Nov. 8, 2013.

(Next Friday--Dallas remembers.)

Wordcraft -- Stephen King on changing history

Stephen King

Stephen King couldn’t have appeared more casual as he strolled onto the stage of the Majestic Theatre in downtown Dallas last week to discuss his new book, “11/22/63,” about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on that date. Smiling and applauding crowds packed the auditorium, but I wondered whether he recalled the smiling crowds that had surrounded the soon to be murdered president.

Perhaps Dallas Morning News journalist Lee Cullum had the same thought. But to her question about what most terrifies the master of horror, he replied, with a deadpan expression, that the true horror was what might lurk in the back seats of all the cars people forgot to lock on their way to see him.

King’s newest book, however, isn’t about his signature horror genre but about the struggle of a man, Jake Epping, who finds a time tunnel -- a “rabbit-hole,” in King’s words, to the past, in the back of a trailer in a tiny town in Maine. A rabbit-hole he will go down in an attempt to prevent Kennedy’s assassination.

Prevention, of course, means knowing whether Lee Harvey Oswald, the man arrested but never tried for Kennedy’s murder, was the real assassin.

“From the book,” Cullum said to King, “it appears you are almost certain (Lee Harvey) Oswald acted alone. Why?”

“I’m afraid the conspiracy people will jump up and say ‘you lie,’” King admitted. “But I’m ninety-eight percent sure it was Oswald acting alone.”

The reason, he said, is the gun. “Follow the gun. It was Oswald who ordered the gun. He picked the gun up at the post office. His wife photographed him with the gun. It was only his gun.”

Still, King leaves room for speculation. If Oswald’s original intent was to assassinate Kennedy, why did he get a job at the Texas School Book Depository where the fatal shots were fired before Kennedy announced plans to visit Dallas, King wondered. What difference might it have made, if Oswald’s estranged wife had been willing to reconcile with him?

“There are forces that decide ninety-five to ninety-eight percent of our lives. The rest of it is wild.”

And why another book about the Kennedy assassination now?

At least partly, King said, because of his belief that history repeats itself -- and not just for his time traveling hero, Jake Epping.

King first tried to write a book about the assassination in the 1970’s, he said, but the experience was still too raw. The urge resurfaced after the election of Barack Obama, who King saw as paralleling Kennedy in many ways, including “the hate that surrounds him,” and with the rise of the tea party movement he equates with the political extremism of Dallas in the 1960’s.

But even for time traveling Jake Epping, the past proves hard to change. As Epping learns, “the past is obdurate. It doesn’t want to change.”

“I think (opponents) sensed in Kennedy the possibility of a real change in society and that scared them,” King said. And then he noted that despite the hatred, people cheered the president along the motorcade route. “The political atmosphere was very dark, but really, there was only one Oswald. But all it takes is one.”

Totally Texas -- Shots still echoing

The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza

411 Elm Street, Dallas

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It was a journalist’s nightmare in the pre-mobile era of 1963 -- an incredible, unexpected story and no way to call it in. Pierce Allman and his co-worker Terrance Ford from local TV station WFAA were among those gathered in downtown Dallas to watch the car carrying President John F. Kennedy, then-Texas governor John Connally, and their wives when shots rang out.

Although they were only two blocks from WFAA (Channel 8), Allman remembered running into the adjacent Texas School Book Depository in search of a phone to call the station. He passed a nondescript-looking young man coming out of the building and apparently thought little of the chance encounter at the time. The young man was later identified as Lee Harvey Oswald, generally believed to be the assassin of President Kennedy.

And the unprepossessing, early twentieth-century brick warehouse where Oswald worked found a place in history when the rifle identified as the one that killed the president was found near a window on its sixth floor.

Almost unbelievably, the building continued to operate as a warehouse for school textbooks until 1970. The Sixth Floor Museum housing exhibits related to the Kennedy assassination opened in 1989 in space leased from the building’s current owner, Dallas County.

The museum is immediately adjacent to Dealey Plaza, the most visited landmark in Dallas. From the plaza, visitors can see the “grassy knoll,” believed by some to be the hiding place for a second gunman in the assassination and later covered with flowers by thousands mourning the president’s death.

The museum’s exhibits include an audio tour narrated by Pierce Allman, who recounts his brush with Oswald, and guides visitors through a vast collection of artifacts detailing the history of Kennedy’s brief presidency, his assassination and its aftermath.

The assassination is one of the events that those who of us alive at the time mark our lives by. I was a sixth grade student in a small town one hundred fifty miles away when a school administrator walked into the classroom full of us eleven and twelve-year-olds to tell us what had happened. We didn’t know how to react. As I sat recently through one of the museum’s short films about the assassination, I wept.

The museum open every day except Thanksgiving and Christmas. Hours are 10 a.m. - 6 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday and noon until 6 p.m. on Monday. Admission is $13.50 for adults, which includes the audio tour. There is a parking lot adjacent to the building, or do what I did -- get off at the Dallas Rapid Transit (DART) West End station and walk about four blocks west. See www.jfk.org or call 214-747-6660 for additional information.