Chances are you keep a list of history places you hope to visit someday — places that you’ve seen in books or documentaries that have captured your imagination in some way. You just want to see for yourself the layout, the angles, the light. I love historic house museums precisely because you get to see a person’s sky and their earth, as nineteenth century author Sarah Orne Jewett wrote of visiting the Bronte sisters’ home. “Nothing you ever read about them can make you know them until you go there.”
Recently I got to visit one of the infamous sites in American history — Dealey Plaza and the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, Texas. site of the President John F. Kennedy assassination. The museum opened in 1989 “after a long decade of controversial development and community soul-searching” according to its website.
The conclusion of the official Warren Commission was that a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, shot President Kennedy in his motorcade on November 22, 1963. Those alive at the time will never forget where they were when they heard the news. Those of us born later cannot possibly escape the endless theories that continuously play out in the popular culture. The death of a young president shocked the nation to its core. The topic seems ubiquitous.
I can certainly understand the city’s hesitance to build a museum. Scenes of tragedy, all too common today, are delicate. Is it morbid to want to try to understand what happened that day? Where is the line between dignity and grisly fascination?
The museum occupies two floors of the historic Texas School Book Depository building and attempts to tell the story of that fateful day and the various conspiracy theories that swirl around it. While the main exhibition has not been updated recently, plans call for a new exhibition in the near future. It is filled with text and large photographs that show the Kennedys at various stops on their trip. As with most museums, only a fraction of the collection is on display. One of the most compelling artifacts to me was the large scale model used by the Warren Commission to study angles and distances.
Model created for the Warren Commission
As I worked my way through the exhibition on a Sunday afternoon in April, I was surrounded by a large number of international visitors speaking different languages, all hushed and concentrating on the text panels. You can see the stacks of boxes by the window, Oswald’s sniper’s perch, where three shots originated that changed the course of world history. A visitor can stand just feet from where Oswald stood. An “X” literally marks the spot in the road where Kennedy sat in his car, waving to the welcoming crowds.
Outside the building stands the grassy knoll, the small grassy hill first described by UPI reporter Albert Smith, and cited by witnesses as a possible source of some of the shots. He wrote “Some of the Secret Service agents thought the gunfire was from an automatic weapon fired to the right rear of the president’s car, probably from a grassy knoll to which police rushed.” The larger Dealey Plaza Historic District is preserved much as looked on the November day. Anyone set on analyzing the site in great detail will be pleased with the ample signage that indicates where witnesses stood and how the motorcade progressed along its route.
The events of the day are well-documented, though certain elements are stored away from public view. What was collected from the day? What federal agencies collected it? I was particularly interested to learn what happened to the trauma room where Kennedy was taken and where he died.
Sites of tragedy are certainly legitimate historic sites that have stories to tell. How the story is told is dependent on each new generation. Dealey Plaza and the Sixth Floor Museum illuminate a dark day in American history and stand to satisfy a country’s need to understand.
Related posts:
The President is Shot – Ford’s Theatre in Washington