Reclaiming History (331 page)

O
ne would think that at least five people (Jackie Kennedy, Governor Connally and his wife, Nellie, William Greer, the Secret Service driver of the presidential limousine, and Roy Kellerman, the Secret Service passenger in the front seat) might forever be immune from being accused, by the terminally wacky buffs, of being involved in the conspiracy to murder Kennedy, if for no other reason than that they themselves were in the line of fire. But not so fast say the conspiracy buffs, unwilling to concede by exemption any
Homo sapiens
who were alive and breathing on November 22, 1963. Conspiracy theorist James H. Fetzer has removed Greer, who was directly within the line of fire for both shots that hit Kennedy, from the line-of-fire defense, claiming that Greer, as a part of the conspiracy, deliberately stopped the limousine after the first shot to make Kennedy an easier target for the remaining shots. So apparently Greer, per Fetzer, decided to place his own life on the line to see that Kennedy was killed. And two young buffs from Canada also removed Greer as well as his partner, Kellerman, from the line-of-fire defense by actually contending that Greer himself turned around and shot Kennedy, Kellerman holding the steering wheel while his partner did the deed. In fact, a Tulsa citizen, serving as his own lawyer, went so far as to file a lawsuit on September 30, 1996, asking the court to find Greer and Kellerman guilty of murdering Kennedy.
¹⁶

That leaves three other passengers in the presidential limousine. Surely at least they have to be immune from the pointed finger, right? Well, not all of them. A few weeks after the assassination, Governor Connally’s wife, Nellie, wrote an account of the assassination on a yellow pad. Thirty years later,
Newsweek
published excerpts from the account. One excerpt refers to Nellie’s visit to her husband’s bedside in the recovery room at Parkland Hospital. “He asked me about the President,” she wrote, and when she told him the president was dead, his reply was, “I knew.”
¹⁷
Conspiracy theorist and author Walt Brown writes, “Those two words [“I knew”] will probably—
and perhaps should
—generate two conspiracy books.”
¹⁸
In other words, there’s at least a chance that Connally was so intent on joining in the conspiracy to murder Kennedy that, like Greer, he was even willing to risk his own life. In fact, conspiracy theorist Harrison E. Livingstone, in his book
The Radical Right and the Murder of John F. Kennedy
, informs his readers that “those in the know in Texas believe that Connally was part of the planning for the assassination.”
¹⁹

I don’t know about Nellie, but it’s probably just a matter of time before some nutty buff removes Jackie’s Oleg Cassini pillbox hat and tries to put the conspiracy hat on her. I mean, she wasn’t quite as much in the line of fire as Connally and Greer were. And God knows, with JFK’s flagrant womanizing, she certainly had a motive. Indeed, how long do we have to wait for some deranged conspiracy theorist to write an article or book stating that President Kennedy was in very ill health, that he had been told he didn’t have too long to live,
*
and that he, yes
he
, was a party to the conspiracy to have himself murdered?
†
The motive? Polls showed his popularity was in decline and he viewed his murder as a good career move. And we know that Kennedy’s popularity did, in fact, rise dramatically as a result of his death on November 22, 1963.

But all of the above assumes that John F. Kennedy was actually killed on November 22,1963. And we don’t know this. Indeed, conspiracy theorist George Thomson, a swimming-pool engineer, is convinced that twenty-two shots were fired in Dealey Plaza, and five people were killed, but not JFK. Officer Tippit was impersonating JFK in the presidential limousine and it was he who was killed. Kennedy escaped and was seen a year later in New York reveling at a private birthday party for author Truman Capote.
²⁰
Who am I to say that George Thomson is wrong?

A verbal exchange on September 17, 1977, at a “Critics Conference” in Washington, D.C., in which G. Robert Blakey, chief counsel for the HSCA, met with nine prominent Warren Commission critics and conspiracy theorists from around the country, captured the essence of the conspiracy movement. When Blakey noted that “nobody has ever suggested that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service” was involved in the assassination, conspiracy theorist Kathy Kinsella spoke up. “Give us time,” she said.
²¹

I am including this brief section in my book for two reasons. One, the coincidences between Lincoln’s and Kennedy’s lives and deaths are so incredible that one can’t help but shake one’s head in wonderment and fascination. But that alone would not justify their inclusion in the book. What does is the fact that in the world of the conspiracy theorists, there is no such thing as a coincidence. Events and circumstances never fortuitously happen and by mere chance relate to each other. They are actually manifestations and evidence of two or more people acting in concert toward a mutual, sinister goal.

The remarkable Lincoln-Kennedy coincidences, several of them first noticed and published three days after Kennedy’s death by Dayton, Ohio, artist and Lincoln scholar Lloyd Ostendorf, follow:

1. Lincoln was elected president in 1860, Kennedy in 1960.
   
2. Both Lincoln and Kennedy were elected president after each had unsuccessfully sought to get the vice presidential nomination of their party—Lincoln in 1856, Kennedy in 1956.
   
3. Both Lincoln and Kennedy had served in the U.S. House of Representatives—Lincoln elected in 1846, Kennedy in 1946.
   
4. The man Lincoln defeated to become president, Stephen Douglas, was born in 1813. The man Kennedy defeated to become president, Richard Nixon, was born in 1913.
   
5. Both Lincoln and Kennedy, while in their thirties, married a pretty, sophisticated twenty-four-year-old brunette who spoke French fluently.
   
6. Both Lincoln and Kennedy had sons who died during their presidency—Lincoln’s son William dying at the age of eleven, Kennedy’s son Patrick dying two days after his birth.
   
7. Both Lincoln and Kennedy, far more than any presidents before them, sought equality for blacks as an inalienable right required by a decent and just nation. And both of their dramatic efforts failed during their lives, the seeds only bearing fruit shortly after their deaths, in Lincoln’s case with the abolition of slavery by the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution on December 18, 1865,
   *
   in Kennedy’s case with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
   
8. Kennedy’s secretary was named Lincoln.
   †
   
9. Both Lincoln and Kennedy were murdered on a Friday.
   
10. Both were shot once in the head.
    
11. Both were seated at the time they were shot.
    
12. Both were shot from behind, in the back of their head.
    
13. Both were shot by assassins who were to their right rear.
    ‡
    
14. Both Lincoln’s and Kennedy’s wives were seated next to them at the time they were shot.
    §
    
15. Each wife, after her husband was shot in the head, cradled his head in her lap.
    
16. Both Lincoln and Kennedy were in the presence of another couple, and in each case the man was also wounded by the assassin (Connally by gunshot, Major Henry R. Rathbone when Booth stabbed him as Rathbone lunged at Booth after Booth shot Lincoln).
    
17. Lincoln
    was shot in
    Ford
    ’s theater. Kennedy was shot in a
    Lincoln
    limousine (manufactured by
    Ford
    Motor Company).
    
18. Though both Lincoln and Kennedy were shot in the head, which normally causes immediate death, neither died instantly, and feverish efforts to resuscitate them were made by several physicians, both presidents responding with an increased though weak pulse before expiring.
    
19. On the day Lincoln was killed, he told an aide that he knew there were those who wanted him dead. “If it is to be done,” he said, “it is impossible to prevent it.” On the day of Kennedy’s murder, he said in his Fort Worth hotel room to Jackie and an aide how easy it would be for someone to shoot him from a “high building with a high powered rifle, and there’s nothing anybody could do.”
    
20. Unlike 99 percent of the population, both presidential assassins, John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald, were known by their three names.
    *
    
21. Both Booth and Oswald were shot and killed before they were brought to trial.
    
22. Both Booth and Oswald were killed by one shot from a revolver.
    
23. Both Lincoln’s and Kennedy’s successors were named Johnson.
    
24. Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, was born in 1808, and Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, in 1908.
    
25. Both Andrew Johnson and Lyndon Johnson were southern Democrats.
    
26. Both Andrew Johnson and Lyndon Johnson had served as United States senators.
    
27. The names Lincoln and Kennedy each contain seven letters.
    
28. The names John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald each contain fifteen letters.
    
29. The names Andrew Johnson and Lyndon Johnson each contain thirteen letters.
    

I can only hope the above list will help conspiracy theorists realize that coincidences that seem to defy mathematical probabilities do happen in life. That’s why there is a name for them, why they are called
co
incidences. In fact, they are so common that we sometimes loosely suggest the phenomenon when no real coincidence exists. “Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine,” Humphrey Bogart says in the movie
Casablanca
about his lover, Ingrid Bergman.

For most Americans, interest in the Kennedy assassination has held firm for going on half a century, our nation unwilling to bury Kennedy or his legacy of inspiring a generation—his youthful image, vigor, and promise seemingly frozen in time.
¹
This is why the pain of his loss lives on. Most believe that interest in the assassination and its perceived mysteries will endure for centuries to come.

Come rain or come shine, in cold or hot weather, people from all over the nation and the world (about two million annually) make their pilgrimage to Dealey Plaza, designated a National Historical Landmark district in October of 1993. Alone, or in twos or threes or more, they whisper and point and stand at or near the two Xs on Elm Street that mark the spots where Kennedy was struck down by two bullets. Repaving the street has only momentarily obliterated the Xs. Within days, assassination buffs or hawkers (who peddle pamphlets, CDs, books, and various other items on the assassination, usually on weekends) have repainted them.
²
*

The site where Kennedy’s assassin was himself gunned down by Ruby, the underground garage in City Hall, is presently closed to the public. But the city fathers, in an effort to revitalize what is now a declining part of downtown Dallas, are expected to open it to the public as a tourist attraction, along with Oswald’s jail cell on the fifth floor of the old Police and Courts Building (part of City Hall) in 2007. The Dallas Police Department moved out of the now mostly vacant building to new headquarters in 2003. The city administration had moved out of City Hall in 1978.
³

With respect to President Kennedy’s grave site, in 1962, the year before Kennedy was assassinated, one million people visited Arlington National Cemetery. During the six months following the assassination,
nine
million came. Today, approximately four and a half to five million people visit the cemetery each year. When I asked Tom Sherlock, the cemetery’s historian, “Approximately how many of these visitors visit President Kennedy’s grave site?” he replied, “99.9 percent. Unless they’re coming here specifically to visit a loved one’s grave, they’re coming to see JFK’s grave and the Tomb of the Unknown Solider.”
⁴

The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, Massachusetts, opened on October 21, 1979, with David Powers, who was in the presidential motorcade in Dallas and was one of JFK’s very closest aides and confidants, as curator, a position he maintained up to his death in 1998. The museum and library contain no assassination-related materials other than several hundred selected books on the assassination, an archivist telling me in 2004 that “we celebrate the president’s life, not his death.” The museum and library have been averaging about 225,000 visitors per year, with 210,594 in 2004.
⁵

As with no other case in American history, network and cable TV, as well as the nation’s print media, unfailingly continue to mark the anniversaries of Kennedy’s death with feature stories and presentations. And of course conspiracy authors continue to write books on their pet theories of the assassination, eighty-four new books coming out since 2003 alone. (Telephone interview of James Sawa on November 26, 2006)

But the only day-in-and-day-out operation or memorial to the assassination of any significance is the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza in Dallas. In 1977, Dallas County purchased the turn-of-the-century building at Elm and Houston, which had been leased to the Texas School Book Depository Company between 1962 and 1970, for the dual purpose of saving a historical site and using the office space. The building reopened in 1981 as the Dallas County Administration Building and eventually the first five floors were occupied by offices, the sixth and seventh floors remaining vacant, with very few visitors allowed to go to the sixth floor. In 1983, the nonprofit Dallas County Historical Foundation was created to raise funds for and to operate a $3.5 million museum on the sixth floor, and the museum opened to much fanfare on February 20, 1989. The museum is meant to be a permanent historical and educational display of photographs, films, graphics, charts, and other related interpretive materials pertaining to the assassination. Under the direction of the museum’s curator, Gary Mack, and its executive director, Jeff West, as of 2005 the museum had collected over twenty-five thousand items pertaining to the assassination, including oral history audiotapes and videotapes of witnesses and others associated in some way with the participants or events of November 22 to 24, 1963. Artifacts include Abraham Zapruder’s camera, one of the three first-generation copies of the out-of-camera original film made on the afternoon of the assassination (the other two, with the out-of-camera film, are at the National Archives), and the FBI model of Dealey Plaza used by the Warren Commission. Everyone, naturally, wants to go to the “corner window,” the sniper’s nest window where Oswald fired at Kennedy below, but the area is now enclosed by Plexiglas. However, one can clearly see the window and study the area from close quarters. Gerry Spence and I went to the window in 1986, before it was enclosed.

The Sixth Floor Museum attracts an average of 450,000 visitors annually, and well over 4 million people have gone to the museum since it opened in 1989. The museum, which also operates a bookstore on the premises selling books and miscellaneous items related to the assassination and the Kennedy family, is managed by a staff of over forty full-and part-time employees and is open seven days a week (except Christmas) from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. at an admission cost of ten dollars. In 2002, the museum renovated and opened the seventh floor, renting it out for special events, such as an exhibit in March of 2003 of silk-screen portraits of Jacqueline Kennedy created by Andy Warhol in the months following the assassination.

In 1970, the city of Dallas erected the JFK Memorial. Located on a block of land owned by Dallas County and bordered by Main, Record, Elm, and Market streets, the memorial, just one block east of Dealey Plaza, is a cenotaph, an empty tomb erected in memory of a deceased person whose body is buried elsewhere. The inscription on a plaque near the cenotaph reads, “An open tomb that symbolizes the freedom of Kennedy’s spirit.” The very large, white structure (2,500 square feet and thirty feet high), consisting of seventy-two white, precast concrete columns, was designed by Philip Johnson, a prominent architect and friend of the Kennedy family. The simple inscription “John Fitzgerald Kennedy” is in gold leaf on two sides of a low, black granite block in the center of the tomb. Bleak, and with no apparent attempt to be aesthetically pleasing to the eye, there were suggestions a few years ago that the tomb be torn down.
⁶

Directly across the street from the JFK Memorial at 110 South Market is the Conspiracy Museum, a two-story structure that has a bookstore, gift shop, documentary theater, and exhibits such as “The Three Hobos,” “Mystery Death List,” and a wall chart display of “Who Killed JFK?” The museum is open seven days a week and has smaller exhibits dealing with the assassinations of Lincoln and RFK as well as JFK. The president of the museum, Tom Bowden, advertises it as “the only place in Dallas to learn about the conspiracy” surrounding the assassination of Kennedy. The museum’s predecessor at the same location was the Assassination Information Center, which was founded in 1989 by the late Larry Howard. Shortly after he died in 1994, and under the new ownership of R. B. Cutler, the Conspiracy Museum started up.

The Rose Hill Cemetery where Oswald was buried is now known as Shannon Rose Hill Memorial Park, located in a low-income area of Fort Worth at 7301 East Lancaster. During a visit there on November 30, 2000, a Memorial Park official told me that around four or five people a week visit Oswald’s grave. Originally, Oswald’s headstone had his first name on it as well as the years of his life, but after the exhumation in 1981, a new, flat, red headstone simply says, “OSWALD,” with no first name or years on it. Facing Oswald’s grave from a nearby road inside the cemetery, one can see where Oswald’s mother, Marguerite, who died of cancer in 1981, is buried, without any headstone or marker, to Oswald’s left. To his right is a headstone with the name “Nick Beef” on it. No one is buried there. The official said she had been told that several years ago some person had paid for the small plot and requested that the fictitious name be placed on the headstone. She did not know why.
⁷

Though an entire nation grieved over the death of President Kennedy, his assassin’s mother grieved hard for her son in the years before she died. Her sole purpose in life seemed to be to convince the world of her son’s innocence. “Lee Harvey Oswald died an innocent man,” she would say. Persuaded that he “was framed,” she would point out that “he was neither tried nor convicted for his alleged crime.” At times she would go beyond this, as when she told the media, in support of her petition to have her son reburied in Arlington National Cemetery, that her son had “done more for his country than any other living human being.” Or when, claiming to have “a very unusual ESP,” she said, “so doesn’t it stand to reason that if my boy shot the President, I would have
known
at the time it happened?” Living in isolation from her family, she never saw her two grandchildren by Lee after November of 1963, and she spent her final years trying to ward off poverty by selling his letters from Russia and other memorabilia to pay the rent.

In May of 1964, during a television program about President Kennedy’s grave, the scene shifted to her son’s grave and the announcer’s words cut to the bottom of her heart. “The assassin’s grave has on it a dead tree,” she recalled his saying. “And a picture was shown of a tree. The leaves had fallen off and it certainly looked dead. Alone in my house I broke down and wept. I soon learned that the tree had been planted a few days earlier, since my last visit to the cemetery. I did not know who put it there, but it had not been watered. I was determined that by the next Sunday my son’s grave would be the nicest-looking in that section of the Rose Hill Burial Park. I pruned the tree, and I felt sure that there was life left in the roots. So I went back every day for a week, morning and evening, to water the tree. And in five days, the ‘dead’ tree in which the television announcer found so much ironic symbolism, started to bloom. Some may wonder why I take such an interest in the grave. First of all, my son is buried there. Regardless of what the world says or thinks, he is still my son. I keep the grave nice, too, because of the many people who come to visit. I, as a mother, want these people to go back home knowing a mother’s love for a son is everlasting.”
⁸