A Rendezvous With Death
Remembering the Literature of the Kennedy Assassination
Murder tumbles into murder, for all to see. Shrouded as we are in the warp and weft of Camelot and conspiracy, America has never allowed itself to reckon truly with those dark days of November 1963, with what one countryman called “the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century.”
Included below are a selection of our favorites sources, certainly not exhaustive, which might do well in establishing a renewed national vernacular.
“America’s Long Vigil” — TV Guide, 1964 — A special section of the weekly magazine published the following January, it breathlessly styled itself “a permanent record of what we watched on television from Nov. 22 to 25, 1963,” including the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, broadcast live and watched by nearly half of all American families, many just returned home from their Sunday worship of choice. Gripping television, certainly, but whether a medium that brought murder into America’s living rooms might be inimical to the nation’s interests, sinful even, is passed over in silence:
“From the moment the first TV news bulletin cut through the sticky storyline of a soap opera called As the World Turns, at exactly 1:40 (EST) on Friday afternoon, the world of communications — if not the world — was to be a vastly different sort of place, never to be quite the same again. It was not just the sudden, senseless cutting down of a young, vigorous President that made the experience cut so deep, but the fact that no one had ever lived a national tragedy in quite these terms before. When Lincoln was assassinated by a frenzied actor at Ford’s Theater in 1865, Americans had time to assimilate the tragedy. Most people in the big cities knew within 24 hours, but there were some in outlying areas for whom it took days.
“In the new world of communications there was no time for any such babying of the emotions, no time to collect oneself, no time for anything except to sit transfixed before the set and try to bring into reality this monstrous, unthinkable thing. Because the word was not only instantaneous but visual, and because at no time did the television reporters known any more than the viewers did, 180,000,000 were forced to live the experience not just hour to hour, or minute to minute, but quite literally from second to second, even as the reporters themselves did. According to Nielsen statistics, a point was reached during the funeral on Monday afternoon when 41,553,000 sets were in use, believed to be an all-time high. For four days the American people were virtual prisoners of an electronic box.”
“A Critique of the Warren Report” — Dwight Macdonald, 1965 — Included alongside Tom Wolfe’s legendary profile of stock car racer Junior Johnson in the March 1965 issue of Esquire, Macdonald’s droll condemnation of the official Report of the President’s Commission On the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy mourns a national poetics surrendered to the banalities of the so-called best and brightest:
“The Warren Report is an American-style Iliad, i.e. an anti-Iliad that retells great and terrible events in limping prose instead of winged poetry. And what prose? The lawyer’s drone, the clotted chunks of expert testimony, the turgidities of officialese, the bureaucrat’s smooth-worn evasions. For the Homeric simile, Research; for the epic surge and thunder, the crepitating clutter of Fact…
“Now Facts are all very well but they have their little weaknesses. Americans often assume that Facts are solid, concrete (and discrete) objects like marbles, but they are very much not. Rather are they subtle essences, full of mystery and metaphysics, that change their color and shape, their meaning, according to the context in which they are presented. They must always be treated with skepticism, and the standard of judgment should not be how many Facts one can mobilize in support of a position but how skillfully one discriminates between them, how objectively one uses them to arrive at Truth, which is something different from, though not unrelated to, the Facts.”
Jack Ruby: The Man Who Killed The Man Who Killed Kennedy — Garry Wills and Ovid Demaris, 1967 — A finely-tuned and well-researched portrait of a strange and damaged man, murderer of a murderer, in which we discover not the contours of a well-wrought and far-reaching conspiracy, but rather the dangerous emotional instabilities of a grieving nation:
“And this explains why the audience is, for conspiratorialists, such a frustrating one — why there is no more (indeed, a good deal less) acceptance of any other theory, once the Warren theory is discounted. The populace is, for theorizers, infuriatingly bored with details of the plot — so long as the plot is dimly, reassuringly there, protecting them from darker things.
“It is not surprising, then, that Ruby should be used for men’s comfort. We are only doing, in our way, what he first did. He typifies our whole range of response — not because he is a typical American (not at all); because he was so unchecked, obvious and almost primordial, in those days of primitive gestures toward self-preservation. He was the buried child or savage in us all…
“Jack had only one way to get a man out — by simpleminded force, as he threw the punks and pimps and creeps down The Carousel stairs. But others will find subtler ways to exorcise this affront to human reason. They too will turn him into a thing, an instrument of more logical agencies hidden somewhere behind him — just a hired gun. The CIA, or Cuba, or Russia, or the mobs, or somebody did it for a reason. It does not matter who they were — Communists? Birchers? both; who cares? — so long as there was a reason.
“But no matter what finesse they use, we recognize these men. Returning to the mystery over and over, trying to ‘solve’ it, to limit, to dispel it, poring over the volumes of clues, all the odd things that ‘do not fit’ (not yet — the assumption is they will fit if we only arrange them better), pinning their hopes on a new book, on better photographic sleuthing, more debate, examination, science, reason, these men — we know who they are (we should, we are these men) — would like to find a simple, clear, demonstrable explanation; ferret out some individual, some group that logically set the thing in motion, which can be traced with the weapons of reason, identified, pointed to, disposed of. Such men are out, intellectually, to get rid of the assassin; still driven by a need to ‘shoot’ him with words, talk, theory, proof — we all know them. They are Jack Ruby.”
Libra — Don DeLillo, 1988 — Reviewed by George Will in the Washington Post as “an act of literary vandalism and bad citizenship,” DeLillo’s ninth novel pushes the rude mechanicals of conspiracy, e.g. the CIA, organized crime, Castro and the Cubans, to the bleeding edge of believability:
“Nicholas Branch in his glove-leather armchair is a retired senior analyst of the Central Intelligence Agency, hired on contract to write the secret history of the assassination of President Kennedy. Six point nine second of heat and light. Let’s call a meeting to analyze the blur. Let’s devote our lives to understanding this moment, separating the elements of each crowded second. We will build theories that gleam like jade idols, intriguing systems of assumption, four-faced, graceful. We will follow the bullet trajectories backwards to the lives that occupy the shadows, actual men who moan in their dreams. Elm Street. A woman wonders why she is sitting on the grass, bloodspray all around. Tenth Street. A witness leaves her shoes on the hood of a bleeding policeman’s car. A strangeness, Branch feels, that is almost holy. There is much here that is holy, an aberration in the heartland of the real.”
“In Memoriam, J.F.K” — Jorge Luis Borges, 1967 — Lamentation from the sightless Argentine, master of the cosmogonal gesture:
“This bullet is an old one… Lincoln had been murdered by that same ball, by the criminal or magical hand of an actor transformed by the words of Shakespeare into Marcus Brutus, Caesar’s murderer… In earlier times, the bullet had been other things, because Pythagorean metempsychosis is not reserved for humankind alone. It was the silken cord given to viziers in the East, the rifles and bayonets that cut down the defenders of the Alamo, the triangular blade that slit a queen’s throat, the wood of the Cross and the dark nails that pierced the flesh of the Redeemer… In the dawn of time it was the stone that Cain hurled at Abel, and in the future it shall be many things that we cannot even imagine today, but that will be able to put an end to men and their wondrous, fragile life.”
The Manchester Affair — John Corry, 1967 — William Manchester’s The Death of a President remains a gripping blow-by-blow of late November 1963, yet few remember the public legal wrangling involved in its publication, as the Kennedy family — in a fit of pique, grief, and political ambition — worked to suppress the ‘official’ account they’d earlier authorized. When all was said and done, Mrs. Kennedy’s inviolate reputation would never quite be the same:
“Nearly any millionaire can open a publishing house, but he can hardly hope for distinction until he has fulfilled his obligation to history and scholarship and art, and suffered along with unknown writers. Harper & Row was stuffed with distinction, and it knew it, and the book business knew it, and it was a sad and unhappy thing for Harper & Row when Jacqueline Kennedy and Robert Kennedy accused it of breaking its word to them. When Cass Canfield said that his ‘experience in connection with The Death of a President has been the most trying and distressing one in a forty-year publishing career,’ he was saying it in sorrow.
“In a way, though, the fight with the Kennedys was a triumph of democracy. In 1817, when J. & J. Harper published Seneca’s Morals, its first book, Robert Kennedy’s family was scratching about for a living in County Wexford, and years later, when J.P. Morgan said that ‘it would be a national calamity if Harper & Brothers had to go into bankruptcy,’ his grandfathers were hustling for votes in the wards and precincts of Boston. Now, in 1966, Harper & Row was locked in battle with the Kennedys, and for all Cass Canfield knew, it was losing.”
A Mother in History — Jean Stafford, 1966 — Disquieting reportage from Dallas, detailing Stafford’s visits with a still grieving and somewhat deranged Marguerite Oswald, served as fitting inaugural for our post-assassination age, in which the devouring mother reigns supreme:
“The graveyard was deserted; we met no other car and we saw no mourners as we spiraled up between granite lambs and marble cherubim, and Mrs. Oswald plaintively remarked on this. ‘If it had been a sunny day, you’d have seen the cars lined up clear up to the gates, people coming to see where my son is buried.’
“Then, in a moment, round a bend, we did see a car ahead of us at the top of a slight rise. ‘Now there!’ she said. ‘There’s somebody after all, even though it isn’t such a nice day, and they’re coming to see Lee.’
“We stopped directly behind a car, which, apple green where it was not besmirched by mud or scabbed with rust, could not have been less than twenty years old; it was long and broad and uncommonly tall, and its rear window was a high, narrow oval through which no human eye could see. It looked as if, when it had been new and probably black, it had been used as a getaway car. Its occupants were slogging through the mud across the road as we opened our doors. They were five boys in their late teens, all rangy and simianly long-armed and all wearing dirty dungarees, dirty T-shirts, dirty sneakers, shaggy, dirty hair.
“‘They’re headed straight for Lee,’ whispered Mrs. Oswald. ‘Now it’s that age I want to reach with my books. The young people. I want to write it all in a way they will understand and know the truth of history.’”
A Specter Is Haunting Texas — Fritz Leiber, 1968 — Post-apocalyptic science fiction, in which cyborg longhairs float in exile around the Moon, Greater Texas menaces the nations, and Dallas casts its long shadow over all:
“Scully, I can see your heavenly instructors knew only the superficial version of Earth’s history, the one pap-fed to the general public. Since you’re going to be meeting some mighty sophisticated and influential men today, it’s best you know a scrap or two of the truth. Amigo mío, the Lone Star Republic never was of the United States. In eighteen-forty-five she assumed leadership of them, because she could see they needed bolstering against foreign aggression and internal disorder, and that was a most accurate foresight, because she had to spend the next three years throwing back the attack of Mexico on them, and pretty soon she had the Civil War to run — both sides.
“Of course it was given out to the general public of the states, who never had no brains or guts nohow and flustered easy, that this assumption of leadership was annexation — but it was always known to the speaker of the House and the senators who counted in Washington that by secretest treaty Texas was boss. Thereafter the presidents in the White House were just figureheads for the Texas Establishment — Franklin D. Roosevelt, for instance, was the puppet of our Jack Garner, a mighty modest kingpin, just as later on Lyndon the great bossed Jack Kennedy, though the latter was posthumously declared an honorary Texas and president thereof because of the grandeur and ritual importance of his demise. With the coming of the Third World War and the atomization of Washington, New York, San Francisco, and so forth, secrecy became unnecessary and Texas took over in name as well as in substance, including for good measure the frosty top and hot, dry, jungly bottom of the continent. We needed more greasers, anyhow, for therapeutic reasons.”
“Sympathy for the Devil” — The Rolling Stones, 1968 — Inspired by the writings of Baudelaire and Bulgakov, Jagger’s Lucifer begins with savoir-faire but ends in shrieking madness. Barry McGuire might sing about the eve of destruction, but had he actually been there? The Rolling Stones certainly had, with ever more fell journeys yet to come:
“I watched with glee while your kings and queens / fought for ten decades for the gods they made. / I shouted out ‘Who killed the Kennedys?’ / when after all it was you and me.”
That Was The Week That Was: The British Broadcast Corporation’s Tribute to John Fitzgerald Kennedy — BBC, 1963 — Forgoing its usual weekly satire to reckon with what had quickly become the world’s own tragedy, the earnestness and intelligence of the BBC’s ensemble presentation underscored an innocence as yet unraveled:
“There are two men in the world, for the first time since the world began, in whose hands there lies the possibility of bringing all life on this globe to an end, and making its charred remains uninhabitable to the end of time. One of those men looks out on the loneliest view in the world, the view from the White House windows in the middle of our bitter and war-torn century.
“And yet how little true it is that all power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It would be closer to the truth to say that such power transforms, elevates, even purifies its holder, that the assumption of so terrible a burden, even as it marks out its bearer as a man forever apart, at the same time gives him the strength to lift it. In what manner this man whose identity is less important than his office has come, by degrees, to bear the burden of hundreds of millions who know nothing of him is no longer important, even if it could be determined. What matters now is that we recognize what we have done.
“The loneliness of power is a universally accepted truth. There remains the recognition of the loneliness of absolute power, the responsibility for all life and death, a responsibility hitherto reserved only to God. In a sense, so terribly real that it transcends paradox, mankind has by a conscious decision appointed for itself a God-substitute, and the blasphemy of the appointment by men of one man to live and die for us all is rooted in the ultimate blasphemy of the world — that it made it necessary.
“And so, once again, we are reminded that no man is an island and the bell that tolls in Dallas told for us all. Not only because of our inextricable interdependence; not only because it shows that although it may be expedient that one man should die for the people, it is neither wise nor just; not only because it teaches us all that we cannot slough off our responsibilities by putting them all onto one elected scapegoat; but above all because as the bell tolls it reminds us — in the hideous emphasis it places upon the reality of power — of the frailty of the body in which that power must ultimately rest, and in doing so, prompts us to remember with Montaigne that sit we never so high on a stool, yet sit we but upon our own tails.”
“The Tongs of Jeopardy” — Brother Antoninus, 1964 — Back before Ramparts became a muckraking fellow traveler of the radical left, it was a modestly avant-garde Catholic literary magazine, in which the Biblical sensibility of the famed Dominican poet was brought to bear on America’s grief:
“When a nation falsifies the vision of its creative destiny with a specious logic, and in doing so rationalizes the corruptness that no logic can justify, God himself assumes the initiative, and visits upon it the most paralyzing rebukes producible from the forces latent in its historic situation. Sometimes these come as natural catastrophes, inflicting a stinging chastisement: earthquakes, floods, drought and starvation. And sometimes they came as naked war, so that the militant energies of a people are summoned up, and the confusion in its heart is purged through sacrifice, hardship and service.
“But sometimes not even war, nor any concatenation of natural disasters can be sufficiently efficacious to reach what has to be reached, the somnolent nerve deep in muffled soul of a people. Too vast and too powerful, it may absorb adversity and sustain misfortune, to emerge exulting in the wonder of its triumph and the savor of its strength. Then comes the hour of great moral or spiritual crisis, and something keener, something more acute, more precisely specified to the deceptive complaisance fattening in the entrails of that people is mysteriously prepared and held in readiness, until the finger of God moves ever so slightly, and there occurs an act destined to take its place forever in its heart and in its soul. That people will receive a wound from which it is fated never to recover, a wound with which it must live for the rest of its days.”
“Who Was Jack Ruby?” — Gary Cartwright, 1975 — Published in Texas Monthly in November 1975, Cartwright’s portrait of Dallas in the early ‘60s, madcap and morally third-world, goes a long way toward explaining what in any other American city (outside of Texas, that is) would remain simply unreckonable:
“A lot of bizarre people were doing some very strange things in Dallas in the fall of 1963… Madame Nhu bought a dozen shower caps at Neiman-Marcus and tried to drum up support for the Diem regime in Saigon, even while her host in the U.S., the CIA, laid plans to assassinate Diem himself. Members of the American Nazi Party danced around a man in an ape suit in front of the Times Herald building. Congressman Bruce Alger, who had once carried a sign accusing Lyndon Johnson of being a traitor, went on television to denounce the Peace Corps as ‘welfare socialism and godless materialism, all at the expense of capitalism and basic U.S. spiritual and moral values.’ Zealots from the National Indignation Committee picketed a UN Day speech by Ambassador Adlai Stevenson; they called him Addle-Eye and booed and spat on him and hit him on the head with a picket sign. When a hundred civic leaders wired strong and sincere apologies to the ambassador, General Edwin Walker, who had been cashiered by the Pentagon for force-feeding his troops right-wing propaganda, flew the American flag upside down in front of his military-gray mansion on Turtle Creek. There were pro-Castro cabals and anti-Castro cabals that overlapped and enough clandestine commerce to fill a dozen Bogart movies. Drugs, arms, muscle, propaganda: the piety of the Dallas business climate was the perfect cover. A friend of mine in banking operated a fleet of trucks in Bogotá as a sideline. Airline stewardesses brought in sugar-coated cookies of black Turkish hash without having the slightest notion of what they were carrying.”
The Wounded Land — Hans Habe, 1964 — Despite an awkward and ill-founded attempt to blame the crimes of an avowed Marxist on the nation’s right-wing milieu, Habe’s first-hand account of a trip through America in the weeks leading up to the assassination reminds us the tumult of the 1960s began much earlier than we allow ourselves to remember:
“There they were, the men in the Texas hats, the police in their white caps, there they were, those maplike faces, those bourbon-whiskey faces, all those ‘two-fisted men.’ And there, too, were the reporters, microphone in hand. That fantasy of things to come in which a reporter sticks his head out of a window and asks the suicide, hurtling past him toward the ground, about his plans for the future here became a reality. The man who is accused of being the President’s murderer — he has in any case murdered one policeman, for certain — came out of the elevator. We saw his face in close-up, a brainless kind of face which looked as though it had not been properly finished off by the Creator. We saw everything. There are no secrets any more, except the one secret which really matters… Then Murderer No. 2 comes on from the right, but the audience does not yet realize what he is. Does the producer realize? The cameras, naturally, are focused on the Leading Man, as for the moment the alleged murderer of the President, the murderer of the day before yesterday, still is. Soon, though, he will make his exit and his place will be taken by a new murderer. We only see the man’s back view as he fires. I cry: ‘The spectacles!’ but nobody hears me. I had noticed, God knows why, a pair of spectacles which Murderer No. 2 — we shall have to start numbering the various murderers — carried sticking out of his breast pocket. Those horn-rimmed glasses were the only touch of reality in the whole scene. All the rest might have been an act, a ‘quickie’ film, with clapper boy, wide screen, the lot. But in a film the murderer would not have carried a pair of spectacles in his breast pocket. It is a scene from real life, and that is how life is, in Dallas, Texas.”
There is a little known book, Oswald's Game, by Jean Davison, which I recommend to all who were beguiled by this customarily excellent Lydwine installment.
As I read, I wondered if you would include the Borges piece, and was glad to see you had.