A Spot Forever Caught in the Cross-Hairs

I visited Orange County’s most frightening building recently, the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas. To go there is to partake in a uniquely American, uniquely portable horror.

A hush lies upon the place, the kind of silence that follows the whispering of only the worst secrets. The brick depository seems inherently innocent, but when you approach it from Dealey Plaza, gravity exerts an additional weight. You are slowed. You are laden. You will bear the burden until you leave and carry a part of it with you, and it will tap upon your conscience whether you go home to Seattle, Key West, Denver, Laguna Beach.

The sixth floor of the book depository is now a museum of the events of Nov. 22, 1963. It is called, simply, the Sixth Floor. Don’t go there if you can’t listen to the language again, if you can’t stand the images. They are as strong and as clear, as resonant as they were on that day. Believe me. Everything comes into a ferocious focus, the hyper-clarity of nightmare. You will be taken back.

You pay at the ground floor entrance--$4 for the regular nightmare, $6 for the audio-guided version. You take the elevator up. The first exhibits offer a glimpse of our country in the early ‘60s. There are pictures of Elvis, a Dylan album cover, shots of civil rights demonstrations, a briefing on the Cuban Missile Crisis, a televised account of President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration. It is the age of scalp-showing flattops, bouffants, skinny neckties, Ed Sullivan. It is, for all its turmoil, also an age of youth and hope.

The centerpiece of the museum, of course, is The Corner, where one Lee Harvey Oswald sat on cartons of children’s textbooks, braced his left elbow on a window sill, waited until the President’s car made its pivot onto Elm and was moving toward the triple underpass, then married the cross-hairs of his Mannlicher-Carcano to the President’s back and changed the course of the world in something like six seconds.

It is beyond strange to stand so close to where something so huge took place. There you are, face to face with the country’s most intimate modern tragedy. If a nation has a soul, then this is surely its darkest corner. No, it does not look ordinary here. No, it is not just a dusty corner in a nondescript building. The Corner is alive, hissing the terrible language of that day, scaled in the bright and ineradicable images. The Corner writes.

Stunned, I got out of there. I walked around the corner, bearing the oppressive weight of Dealey Plaza, and stumbled into an even greater hell than the Sixth Floor museum--The Assassination Information Center. This is dedicated to collecting information on who shot the President.

Exhibited as possible conspirators are Oswald, Castro partisans, right-wing zealots, the CIA, FBI and Secret Service, the New Orleans and Chicago mobs, the Soviet KGB, French assassins, Marseilles drug lords, Corsican hit men, nightclub strippers, Dallas cops, a New Orleans private eye, a gallery of vicious near-idiot scum with alleged CIA backgrounds.

They are all connected and interlaced, then separated and isolated, then rearranged, shuffled and rearranged again into every conceivable--and inconceivable--combination. I left this place feeling as if I’d brushed elbows with every facet of human evil that can be personified. And one word rang through my head: conspiracy.

I had clung to the idea of conspiracy--as have many of us--since that dismal November day, but as I walked again through Dealey Plaza, I began to understand why. I wanted to. I wanted to, because conspiracy brings drama to chaos. It promises something more profound than the everyday. On this level, it would have to have been extraordinarily brilliant, and I wanted to believe that something extraordinary happened that day. Conspiracy afforded me the luxury of belief--a religion of sorts. I embraced it.

There is another reason why so many of believe in a conspiracy: We can each have our own. This secular faith is both generous and inclusive (the people who run the Sixth Floor museum and the Assassination Information Center not only understand this, they promote it. Oliver Stone profited nicely from it). One theory need not rule out another. None can be fully proven; none absolutely dismissed. Each worshiper can sketch out a drama based on the conditions of his or her own soul, compose a personal gospel.

I have no conspiracy theory at all because I don’t think there was one. A disgruntled dweeb named Oswald found himself with a job at the book depository and got a gun. When standing in The Corner, one can’t help but notice what an easy shot he would have had. End of plot.

If there was a conspiracy, it was not one of men but of time, place and circumstance. The Greeks had a word for it--tragedy. Webster defines tragedy as “a serious drama typically describing a conflict between the protagonist and a superior force (as destiny) and having a sorrowful or disastrous conclusion that excites pity or terror.” The assassination was a tragedy; the “conspirators” (all one of them) a simple player.

This is as far as my tiny brain has taken me, and quite frankly I’ve had enough for now.

When I left Dealey Plaza it was drizzling and the sky was brooding gunmetal gray. I returned home to Orange County, where the same sky prevailed, the same drizzle fell, and the same feeling of pity and terror ruled my heart.

I walked up my favorite hillside in Laguna Canyon, let the rain spatter down and looked out to the city I call home.

What I saw instead, through the unremitting gray, was the motorcade turning onto Elm Street--or was it Coast Highway--the glimmering black Continental heading for the triple underpass--or was it just the traffic light at Broadway, the motorcycles screaming ahead toward the hospital--or was it just two riders beginning a leisurely pedal up the canyon?

Someday, I wondered, will it matter less?