Reflections after 60 Years

A front page story in the Dallas Morning News (11/21/2023) reports that the population of the Dallas-Fort Worth area in Texas has reached 8,000,000, most of which is in suburbs. That is around five times that of 1963. The city of Dallas has doubled its population during that period from around 679,000 to 1,303,000. A lot else has changed during that time, in Dallas, the State, and the Nation. It was a different world sixty years ago.

How much difference flowed from one horrible event that occurred here has been and probably will be an ongoing topic of research and speculation, though most rational persons know the case is closed.

Sixty years ago this day, November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was killed on a downtown street. It is difficult to believe that so many years have passed since that horrible event. President McKinley’s assassination in 1901 was as distant for those in 1963 as Kennedy’s is for us today.

The Kennedy assassination events spawned widespread condemnation of Dallas and its citizens collectively. Such condemnation was practically worldwide. It ascribed collective guilt, or guilt by association, for the evil acts of an individual to a whole community of other individuals who had a connection to the place.

Dallas further was condemned because the assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was killed while in police custody shortly after committing his foul deed. To the extent there was culpable negligence on the part of Dallas Police for this second killing, it must be viewed in context. City officials at the time believed it was important to show the world via the news media that there was timely identification and capture of Oswald, at the time a prime suspect, and allay the fears there might be a conspiracy threatening the government similar to the cabal that killed Abraham Lincoln and attempted to kill several of his cabinet members. Many would regard Oswald as receiving swift justice at the hands of Jack Ruby, albeit without due process. Ruby stated that he killed Oswald because he wanted to spare Jackie Kennedy having to be a trial witness and relive the horror of seeing her husband’s brain blown out while sitting next to him. One can sympathize with Ruby, though not excuse him for that.

It has been asserted that the downstream effect of Oswald’s killing spawned numerous conspiracy theories. Perhaps, but such theories would have doubtless come forth anyway. It is difficult for many persons to accept that a lone pathetic individual, a serial loser, could by himself kill a President and change the course of the country’s — and perhaps the world’s history.

Assigning collective guilt or collective responsibility — for evil deeds the concept amounts to the same thing — is endemic to the human condition, even in a country and culture that values and is supposed to assign responsibility to the individual rather than to associations or collectives. The same goes for the guilt of which numerous pundits accused Dallas and its citizens.

Part of the reason for such accusations was because Dallas in 1963 was seen to be a hotbed of conservative, even far-right, politics that provided the climate for political violence

. In 1963, like the resurgence in recent years, most of our national intelligentsia and media leaned to the left and often opined that those to the right-of-center politically were an “existential threat” to democracy. Kennedy on the other hand was a celebrity politician and regarded as a liberal who leaned leftward. It was reported that Mrs. Kennedy said she was disappointed that her husband was deprived of martyr status for his stand on civil rights for black citizens because his killer was a “silly little communist” rather than the right-wing hater the President’s assassin was at first assumed to be. The reality was the President was essentially moderate, particularly in economic matters (he cut taxes, drastically). He turned out to be an effective President in foreign affairs. No conservative would fault his staring down the Soviets during the Cuban missile crisis or his stance on West Berlin.

There is little question that there are violent crazies on each of the far ends of the political spectrum. Possibly more on the left, as recent events have born out.

As for Presidential assassinations in this country, in the 20th Century there have been two successful and no fewer than a half dozen attempts. Successful assassins Leon Czolgosz, President William McKinley’s assassin, and Oswald were both leftist fanatics. Other Presidents who were attacked but not killed include Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 (out of office but campaigning for another term) whose assailant was adjudged insane by a court; Franklin Roosevelt, two weeks before his first inauguration was shot at by a leftist who said he hated “capitalists”; Puerto Rican nationalists tried to kill President Harry Truman in 1950; Gerald Ford was shot at once and threatened close-up on two occasions within a month of each other 1975 by leftist women (one of whom was a follower of Charles Manson); President Ronald Reagan was shot and wounded in 1981 by a man who was tried and adjudged to be legally insane.

There have been other alleged plots, security incidents, and expressions of intent to kill or harm other Presidents, including Carter, both Bushes, Obama, Trump, and Biden. These would-be assassins have come from both extremes of the political spectrum, or suffered from various stages of mental derangement.

What about the speculative theory that Oswald was a hireling or dupe of some national or international conspiracy? The bipartisan Warren Commission concluded that Oswald acted alone. Later, after exhaustive research and analysis detailed in his book Case Closed (1993) Gerald Posner concluded that Oswald and Ruby acted alone and independent of each other. Former Los Angeles district attorney Vincent Bugliosi (who prosecuted Charles Manson and his acolytes) concluded the same in his 1,632 tome Reclaiming History: the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy (2007). There are those who will continue to believe in conspiracy, whether by the CIA, Fidel Castro, or venal businessmen. Such persons are like the medieval alchemists who insanely sought the Philosophers’ Stone.

See also Investigation of a Homicide: The Murder of John F. Kennedy by Judy Whitson Bonner (1969); Death of a President by William Manchester (1967).