When President Kennedy was assassinated, the world stopped, then shifted. In the way we now talk about September 11, for those who were alive and aware that November day fifty years ago, “I remember exactly where I was when I heard” is a touchstone of personal history. Virginia Woolf called these instances “moments of being,” when the difference between before and after is burned into memory by our hyper-awareness of the extraordinary. We have precise and perfect recall of the smell of classroom chalk when the principal’s choked voice came over the loudspeaker, the polka-dot scarf our neighbor was wearing when she ran weeping across the grass, the birds singing in the leafless apple tree as the radio blared the news, because these surrounding events and images, however quotidian, suddenly stand in sharp relief against unspeakable tragedy.
But even if we have no personal memory of that day, whether because we were too young in 1963 or we are of more recent generations for whom the assassination is history, we still live with its reverberations. Kennedy’s murder shaped the second half of the 20th century, and in turn is shaping the beginnings of the 21st.
An exercise in probability and possibility:
If Kennedy had not been killed, it is likely we would have gotten out of Vietnam by 1965. Robert McNamara, Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense, wrote that the President had been working on a troop withdrawal strategy when he died. Would Johnson have then run for President in 1968? Would Robert F. Kennedy have entered the 1968 race if Johnson had run? RFK’s platform was to end the Vietnam War. If he didn’t run, would he still have been assassinated? How about Martin Luther King, Jr. – would he have been murdered as well? That’s harder to say, but even so would the nationwide civil unrest that followed these assassinations erupted in such a terrible way? A lot of the anger was fueled by the endless war and the feeling that the Johnson administration was leading us to disaster. So perhaps the violence and rage would have been tempered. It is possible.
If the unrest was contained and limited, we can also ask, would Richard Nixon been elected? His platform was restoring law-and-order to a country seemingly run amok with crime. And if no Nixon, no Watergate. If no Jimmy Carter as an antidote to Nixon, then no Ronald Reagan in response to Jimmy Carter? We can carry this on and on. As Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” We don’t even have to reach back to find it.
But Oswald's and his auxiliary Jack Ruby’s nobodiness is the point. They were nobodies who wanted desperately to be somebodies. That desperation led to desperate acts, and both of them were aided by chance and dumb luck. To our everlasting grief, they became the somebodies they yearned to be. As Sirhan Sirhan, RFK’s assassin, once said to investigators, “At the moment he pulls the trigger, the man with the gun rules the world.” This time, for the first time, the world saw it unfold before them in their living rooms.
An exercise in What If:
And it was random. All of it was random, although fed by Oswald’s twisted psyche. Oswald had gotten the job at the Texas School Book Depository through the efforts of a family friend. Oswald’s wife Marina knew that a few weeks before, he had taken a shot through a front window at well-known right winger General Walker, but said nothing. Oswald was seen carrying a long package wrapped in brown paper into the Depository (curtain rods, he said). While his co-workers found windows from which to watch the motorcade, he stayed upstairs alone on the 6th floor, in a room whose floor was being revarnished, and no one asked why he was up there..
Prior to the shooting, at least six people saw Oswald standing with his rifle at parade rest in the open 6th floor Depository window. One of the witnesses said to his wife, “Look. Do you want to see a Secret Service man?” No one said anything to any of the policemen standing every few feet along the street.
In Dallas,the morning of November 22 had been rainy and damp. If it continued raining, the top of the President’s limousine would have stayed on. But the rain cleared up, the sun came out, and the car top came off. Oswald had an unobstructed view of the limousine and its passengers as it slowly passed by his building. The first shot missed; the second, survivable shot entered at the top of the President's shoulders, then exited through the front of his throat and pierced Gov. Connally’s back. Finally, the third, catastrophic shot. If Kennedy had not been wearing the unyielding molded plastic backbrace that forced him upright, it’s possible he could have collapsed across the seat after he was hit the first time (as Connally did), taking himself out of the line of fire.
And then, Oswald's murder. Jack Ruby, an unstable, slightly stupid, blustering strip club owner and law enforcement apple-polisher who liked to hang around the station giving out free drink coupons to the cops, slipped into the garage during the only ten seconds the entrance was unguarded. He stood in plain sight against the wall with the reporters, a familiar face to almost everyone present, and in the hubbub, no one took any notice of him. Then, as Oswald was brought out, Ruby stepped forward and fatally shot him in the stomach - right in front of millions of television viewers. It was insane. How could this dopey blowhard have carried out such a murder on his own? Of course, someone had sent him to silence Oswald.
The what if’s of this tragedy are almost unendurable. While often aggravating for non-believers to have a conversation with, Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists are acting out of an impulse that is understandable and perhaps even deserving of compassion. It’s a part of human nature to seek the pattern in the disorder, to try to find meaning even if overwhelming evidence makes the case for chaos. And if meaning isn't really there, maybe we impose it, out of horror, out of grief, out of the terror of knowing that sometimes, we are all at the mercy of an indifferent universe.