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.)

Totally Texas -- JFK sites in Dallas, 50 years later

While lurking around the entrance to the parking garage of the former Dallas police headquarters, I met a friend from church coming out. She was with a group tour, she said, of sites associated with the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The underground parking garage was where Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot Kennedy’s presumed assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. Next stop on my friend’s tour was Texas Theatre, the site of Oswald’s arrest. (And incidentally, the site I had just come from.) My friend’s tour group had a comfortable-looking motor coach waiting at the corner. But with the help of this post, you can arrange your own tour of major sites.

It’s slightly less than a mile from the site of Kennedy’s death to that of Oswald’s, for those who want to make the trip on foot. You may even find walking the easiest method if you’re coming into Dallas for the city’s 50^th anniversary commemoration November 22.

The parking garage is at 2014 Main Street, the 1950’s era brick annex to the city’s old Beaux Arts-style Municipal Building. The complex, which in 1963 housed the Dallas police headquarters where Oswald was interrogated, is across the street from Main Street Garden Park. Most days, all you’ll be able to see of the site of Oswald’s shooting is a barred overhead gate. However, as I learned from my friend’s experience, the city allows tours. Call 214-670-3000 and ask for Captain Fred Gonzales to arrange a tour. Metered streetside parking is available around the Municipal Building and Main Street Garden. I’m using a picture of the garage’s interior on the assurance of the police officer aiding my friend’s tour that the banal signage dates from the era (and was probably Oswald’s last conscious sight.)

Walking west on Main Street will take you along the major portion of Kennedy’s motorcade through downtown Dallas. Don’t bother detouring down Commerce Street, which runs parallel to Main, hoping to see Ruby’s Carousel Club nightclub, which once adorned its 1312 ½ Commerce Street site with pictures of the scantily-clad dancers who entertained inside. It was torn down decades ago to make room for the pleasant but not terribly memorable AT&T Plaza. For video (perhaps best not viewed with your kids) of what the sinny-side of downtown Dallas looked like in 1963, see www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDO8ml-H94U/.

Continuing on Main Street, you’ll come to Dallas’ memorial to Kennedy, the enormous Philip Johnson-designed marble cenotaph at 646 Main Street. Turn right on Houston Street, then left on Elm Street past the former Texas School Book Depository, 411 Elm Street, whose sixth floor corner window is believed to have been Oswald’s sniper seat. The red brick building now houses the Sixth Floor Museum, dedicated to the tragedy. For more about the museum and its programs, see
www.jfk.org/.

Look west from Dealey Plaza park across the street from the museum to see the small hill--“the grassy knoll”-- believed by some to have been the hiding place for a second shooter and the triple underpass onto Stemmons Freeway (I-35E), where the motorcade took on its dash to Parkland Hospital, 5201 Harry Hines Blvd., in the vain hope the president’s life could be saved. Two days later, Oswald, dying from Ruby’s bullets, would be taken to Parkland as well. A plaque inside the hospital now commemorates both victims, and there are plans for a JFK memorial garden as the hospital undergoes major renovation.

On Dallas' south side is the site of Oswald’s arrest, the Texas Theatre, 231 West Jefferson Blvd. Oswald was found in the movie theater on the afternoon of November 22, 1963, after shooting local beat officer, J.D. Tippit. (For help locating the graves of Tippit and Oswald, see “Dallas dead, the famed & the infamous,” October 25, 2013, at this site.) The movie theater barely escaped the Carousel Club’s fate, first losing its gaudy façade to a stucco re-design, then standing vacant for several years. It’s back in business as a movie theater and event venue, and will premiere the documentary “Capturing Oswald” Monday, November 11. For more about its history, see
http://thetexastheatre.com/.

Wordcraft -- The face that drove Oswald to kill

The Accidental Victim

by James Reston, Jr.

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It seemed at first a notion both absurd and demeaning to the grandeur of its victim and its enduring tragic consequences -- the idea that President John F. Kennedy might have been only an unfortunate bystander at his own assassination. But that was what author/historian James Reston, Jr., proposed to his audience at last week’s audience from Friends of SMU Libraries. And he made a compelling case.

It’s not another conspiracy theory. Reston expressed dismay over a poll by the History Channel that found eighty-five percent of Americans favoring conspiracy in some form as a factor in President Kennedy’s death. There’s one part of the Warren Commission’s findings Reston’s willing to accept -- that apparent assassin Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. After all, he asked, “what government or mobster would entrust so horrendous an act as presidential assassination to a volatile, unreliable character like Oswald?”

Instead, Reston believes that the true target of Oswald’s bullets was not the president, but the man riding with him as their convertible drove slowly through Dallas that sunny day in 1963 -- Texas Governor John Connally.

Who wouldn’t wonder, why Connally?

To a great extent, Reston said, because as former secretary of the Navy, Connally had given the “classic brush-off” to Oswald’s pathetic, almost illiterate letter asking for help overturning his downgraded discharge from the Marine Corps. The discharge that, in the view of the ninth-grade dropout that Oswald was, kept him from the employment he needed to support his wife and children.

Worse still, Connally’s perfunctory reply, more than a year after Oswald’s letter, arrived in “a campaign envelope, with John Connally for Governor emblazoned on the front, and Connally’s smiling face centered within a Texas star. . . Connally’s face became the face
of the U.S. government.”

The story isn’t complete without mention of the political infighting that put Connally in the same car with Kennedy, the overworked security team that took little notice of Oswald, the Kennedy vanity that sent a slow-moving convertible past the ex-Marine’s place of employment in the Texas School Book Depository, the rigid back brace that left Kennedy an upright, unmoving target as everyone else scrambled for cover following Oswald’s initial bullet.

At the height of the Cold War, how could the Warren Commission bear to label this anything but an act of political terrorism. A deed so horrible, so vast in its potential consequences surely deserves an antagonist grander than a lone emotional misfit -- although lone emotional misfit is the profile of the overwhelming majority of domestic assassins, terrorists and wannabes, from John Wilkes Booth through Squeaky Fromme to Nidal Hasan.

“My entry into the Lee Harvey Oswald story came through my own military service,” Reston said. It was through serving in the military, Reston said, that he understood both Oswald’s anguish over the downgrading of his discharge from the Marine Corps and the factors that really turn a person against his homeland.

One thing he learned to look for in recruiting foreign agents was “a strong emotional reason for doing something dangerous -- an obsession with a sense of belief of being wronged.”

“If my discharge changed from honorable to dishonorable, in a secret process. . . I would be distraught,” Reston. And so, he maintained, was Oswald.

Despite Oswald’s continued lip service to communism, the sense of wrong didn’t send him back to the Soviet Union, didn’t make his anger political rather than personal.

In an entry in Oswald’s diary, given in his original spelling, he wrote, “When I frist went to Russia in the winter of 1959 my funds were very limited. So after a certain time, after the Russians had assured thereselfs that I was really a naïve american who believed in communism, they arranged for me to recive a certain amount of money every month. . . It really was payment for my denudation of the U.S. I have never mentioned the fact of these monthly payments to anyone. I do so in order to stat that I shall never sell myself intentionally or unintentionally to anyone again.”

For more about Reston and his works, including The Accidental Victim, see
www.restonbooks.com/.

Totally Texas -- Documents rare and arresting

This week’s weather alarms reminded me of the need to write about indoor events as well as outdoor ones. While haunting one of my favorite indoor venues, the Dallas Public Library, I came across an exhibition of memorabilia about President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

Right, I live in the city known as the site of the most infamous U.S. assassination since Abraham Lincoln’s. We can’t escape it, especially in this fiftieth anniversary year of Kennedy’s death.

The first floor of the Dallas Public Library’s central branch, 1515 Young Street, showcases front pages coverage of the assassination from both daily newspapers in existence in 1963. But the majority of the collection is on view on the library’s seventh floor. Among other artifacts, the exhibition includes the Dallas Morning News full page photo of the murder of Kennedy’s presumed assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, by Jack Ruby; numerous courtroom sketches of Ruby’s trial by journalist-illustrator John Groth (Oswald was killed before he could go to trial); political cartoons of the period; and condolence notes to the Kennedy family.

The photos are no more graphic than coverage of last month’s Boston Marathon bombing, but may want to exercise caution if visiting the exhibit with young children.

I actually went to the library for a look at the permanent collections on the seventh floor -- a long-lost copy of the U.S. Declaration of Independence and a Shakespeare first folio.

It always surprises me that these permanent exhibits aren’t packed with people. The Shakespeare folio is one of about 250 still in existence, presented to the library in 1986. The Declaration of Independence is one of about two dozen surviving copies of the declaration’s first printing. Each is housed in its own room.

I’ll admit, my first-grader grandsons probably won’t be thrilled by these documents just yet. But for children in higher elementary grades and up -- and yes, adults, too -- seeing these is something not to be missed.

They’re free, and accessible during the central branch’s hours, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday; noon to 8 p.m. Thursday; and 1 -5 p.m. Sunday. The library is closed on Mondays and city holidays.

Totally Texas -- Reinventing Old Red

Old Red Museum

100 South Houston St.

Downtown Dallas

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It’s hard to believe Dallas once deemed its nineteenth century courthouse an “eyesore.” True, the courthouse turned museum looks more like a Disney World castle on steroids than anything at home on the Texas prairies. Built of bright red sandstone, capped by a ninety-foot clock tower, surrounded by enough turrets to turn McMansion dwellers green with envy, it flaunts its distinctiveness.

Does the 1890’s Romanesque style of the building nicknamed “Old Red” clash with the austere façade of the Kennedy memorial next door? With the pioneer Bryan log cabin across the street? With the warehouses of the nearby Sixth Floor Museum building and neighboring West End? That’s its charm.

Although outdated as a courthouse, Old Red’s fans reinvented it in the twenty-first century’s first decade as a museum of Dallas County history. Inside, its second floor galleries trace the story of this piece of land from prehistory through the present.

There’s plenty of serious stuff, but the quirky bits fascinated me most on a recent visit. Things like a letter from the Confederate government refusing to pay a ferry owner for her work on the grounds of “funds not available.” A cautionary note for victims of current succession fever?

Then there's a Ku Klux Klan mask reputed to belong to a local, although unnamed minister.  The notebook of interviews with witnesses to the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby.  Aftermath footage of the ambush death of Depression-era outlaws Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. 

I loved the interactive touch screens, which included the Dallas Morning News front page coverage of Bonnie and Clyde’s death scene illustrating this post. (But if you’re visiting with small children, you’ll want to steer them away from film of the death car.)

Currently, only the first two floors of Old Red are open to the public. However, a guided tour of all four floors is available, generally at 2 p.m., and included in the general admission price ($8 for adults, $5 for children ages 3-16). Call 214-757-1949 to verify tour times.

You can pay an additional $2 for nearby parking, or walk, as I did, from one of the nearby DART stations -- West End or Union Station. Old Red is open daily from 9 a.m. - 5 p.m. It’s closed Thanksgiving Day but open the Friday after Thanksgiving. For additional information, group reservations and Sunday discounts, see www.oldred.org/.

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.