On a rainy Saturday afternoon two weekends ago, I stood 40 yards away from a downtown street, watching a few people on the sidewalk point at a large X in the center lane as they posed for a picture.
“Whatever you do, don’t go out in the street,” said Ivan, our tour guide. “I’ve seen two people who did that get hit by cars.”
The interest in the X is understandable. It marks the spot on Elm Street in Dallas where President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963.
A few yards back are three more Xs, almost on top of each other but in slightly different positions. Ivan said that’s where Kennedy and Texas Gov. John Connolly first got wounded, but historians cannot agree on the precise location. Thus the three Xs. You can see it all on Google Maps.
To me, the compulsion to take a picture of yourself at the place where a president got killed is disrespectful. But it’s a free country.
It was more meaningful to spend a couple of hours at Dealey Plaza with a guy who knows a lot about the assassination, which Ivan clearly did.
I was with my brother Patrick, his daughter Alia and my son John, and we got an excellent two-hour tour of downtown Dallas, with information about the assassination and the conspiracy industry that it created.
We were in Dallas for a wedding. My first cousin Anne Leonhard’s grandson Jack married his sweetheart Olivia, and everyone had a grand time. It’s always fun to see my kids and my cousins.
The Friday night party and Saturday night wedding were wonderful. But I’m certain that the JFK tour is what will stick with me.
Patrick had the idea for the tour and got tickets online. Good for him.
There was a light rain on Saturday afternoon as he, John, Alia and I walked the six blocks from our hotel to Dealey Plaza. It was supposed to be a walking tour, but because of the weather we used a minivan to get around. That actually turned out to be a positive.
Ivan the tour guide was great. I hope the stuff he told us was true, especially that as a kid in the late 1970s, he lived across the street from Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother and mowed her lawn.
That experience and other events in his life convinced Ivan that he was destined to be a Dealey Plaza tour guide, and he has done plenty of research into the assassination.
Before we went to the plaza, Ivan drove up Commerce Street to talk about Jack Ruby, the nightclub owner who killed Oswald two days after the assassination.
He pointed to the right, and said a recessed door in a tall building was about where the front door of Ruby’s club was in 1963.
Then I looked to our left. We were in front of the Rodeo Bar, where all of us had been at Friday night’s wedding party. American history is all over downtown Dallas.
Ivan made two left turns and slowed down as he passed a narrow entrance to a below-ground garage. That’s where Ruby, whom the Dallas police knew and liked, walked in to shoot Oswald.
Back at Dealey Plaza, near where Abraham Zapruder recorded his famous film of the assassination, we stood on a covered walkway above Elm Street and talked to Ivan about the case. He had a binder with photos and other information to share.
Ivan believes there were two shooters: Oswald and someone on the “grassy knoll,” from which we were only a few feet away.
I have read the 1993 book “Case Closed” by Gerald Posner, which makes a detailed, compelling argument that Oswald acted alone. I agree. But I promised Ivan that I would read “Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy,” by Jim Marrs, which contends that it was a conspiracy. It was the basis for the 1993 Oliver Stone film “JFK.”
We did not have time to visit the Sixth Floor Museum in the building where Oswald worked. So there will be a return trip to Dallas one day.
We may never know the truth about what happened in 1963. But seeing the places where it all happened really drove home the importance of what occurred there.
JFK, civil rights resistance, Vietnam, MLK, RFK, Watergate — more than a decade of events that eroded confidence in our institutions and our leaders. It started when President Kennedy was killed, and it has never stopped. Having it in front of me, and walking through it, was a much better memory than posing for a selfie near a dismal X in the middle of Elm Street.
That X marks more than a president’s death. It’s the spot where America changed.
