Vague Memories of Dealy Plaza

I lived in Dallas several years ago and made the seemingly obligatory visit to The School Book Repository and its Sixth Floor Museum. I roamed the streets and grassy knoll of Dealy Plaza. It was an odd feeling, sort of like the feeling you get walking around the pyramids of Mexico or the battlefields of Chickamauga; a feeling of the weight of history on a place.

Unlike those other places, the traffic still flows through Dealy, drivers in their cars driving unnoticing over the small X's painted on the road where key points in that day's events - 40 years ago tomorrow - took place. Yet for all its "ordinariness," that weight is still there; above the street noise is a silence that is somehow louder than tires on asphalt or the roar of engines. It's hard to explain, but if you been to any site where history hangs in the air, you'll know what I mean.

When JFK was assassinated, I was not quite three years old. Yet, probably through some combination of actual memory of such a momentous event and the retelling of family stories, I seem to have vague memories of those days. What I think I remember is standing in front of the television - black and white - watching pictures of Kennedy's Caisson rolling up a street in Washington, D.C. I have no other memories so clear of that time, but there is a sense of confusion and sadness when I try to remember those days; when I try to see beyond the television images.

What informs the rest of my memories and thoughts on the assassination is what I've read on the subject, the investigative news specials, the Warren Commission reports, books. I've never subscribed to the more fantastic conspiracy theories that remain so popular and I've never had the desire to watch Oliver Stone's confabulation "JFK." But I do wonder. I wonder what the world would be like if Kennedy had lived; what would have been different. No-one can say, of course, with any degree of certainty. And I've always thought that "what-if" histories were a sort of mental self flagellation. But the thoughts are there, in the back of my mind.

What would have been different? What would have been the result if Camelot had been allowed to flourish?

The vision, the memories, the hopes for Camelot contrast so brightly against the despair so many feel today. The contrast of the idealistic, young, war hero Jack Kennedy - all his human foibles now known - with the shallow, corporatist, uncurious, duty shirking Bush is striking not just for it's dissonance. But also in how the two men affect(ed) those around them. In 1962 there were problems to be sure; but there was hope there was confidence that they could be solved: civil rights, the cold war and the growing troubles in South East Asia. Today there seems to be a growing malaise; of helplessness over problems seemingly too big for those in power to comprehend, much less to solve.