JFK Memorial, Dallas — Dealey Plaza and the Legacy of John F. Kennedy
The JFK Memorial in Dallas is separate, but a comfortable walking distance, from Dealey Plaza, where the President was assassinated. My speculation is that this is intentional, that it seemed right that Dealey should be kept intact, the same as it was that day, a living memorial of the assassination, still frozen in time, while the monument to the man could be separate, still sobering but less intrinsically tragic. I could be wrong; I choose not to be dissuaded.
I was in Mrs. Caldwell's third grade class at Pine Street Elementary School in Spartanburg, South Carolina, when the announcement came over the PA that the President had been shot. The announcement did not say he had been killed, but the news was no less stunning. We were close to the end of the school day already, so we were released immediately. Those of us who walked to school did not have to wait to leave for home. My younger brother and I did not understand the depth of what had happened; we only knew it was fearful. At the height of the Cold War, with bomb shelters and classroom defense drills, no one knew what might be coming next.
We arrived home to find our parents sobbing in front of the TV. That was when the gravity of the event began to seep in. As they switched between Walter Cronkite on CBS and Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC, as I watched all these adults succumb to grief, I knew we had lost something in a terribly severe way.
I grew up haunted by this event. I would read so many books about the assassination, including the Warren Report itself. I would see the movies, watch the TV shows, follow the hearings, everything with its unsatisfactory inability to articuate an irrefutable answer. I also grew up admiring JFK, notwithstanding the revelations that would show him either to be small or simply human, depending on your point of view. I chose to remain inspired by his words and his public actions. When I lived back east, I traveled to Arlington National Cemetery every year to pay my respects at his grave. In his time, Kennedy stood for an America that opposed totalitarianism, stood by, for and in Berlin, chose to go to the moon, stepped all too gingerly into the modern civil rights era. Like much of our history, and the documents that define us, his words were aspirational, if not fully realistic or pragmatic.
In the 70s, I would come to work for U.S. Senator Sam Nunn in Washington [as did my mom], and while there, my parents visited. I arranged tickets for them to have a private tour of the White House. Toward the end, we came to Aaron Shikler's posthumous painting of Kennedy, hanging in the Cross Hall on the State Floor, a long central corridor that stretches between the East Room and the West end of the State Floor. Once again, I watched them cry.
This image of the JFK Memorial echoes some of the Dealey Plaza panorama: the slain president laid low, his valiant but insufficient guardians around him, the sniper's darkness above. But the light remains on the legacy he left behind, a time when, flaws and all, we stood for something meaningful, something inspirational, something of purpose and clarity. And a young man raised our voice.
History is riven by dark times. This is one of the ones that belongs to my time. And like all such times, the darkness is bounded by light.
Provenance: Phase One XT • IQ4.150 • Rodenstock 32mm (2024)
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