Mary Moorman's memorable photo of the Kennedy assassination.
I've been searching the internet, but if anyone has published an article investigating any of the still unresolved issues in the Kennedy assassination lately, I've missed it.
Today, by the way, is the 45th anniversary of that assassination.
Here in Dallas, the only article I've seen about the assassination today, in the Dallas Morning News, laments the rate of attrition among the witnesses to it.
But everything I've read is a remembrance. Unlike anniversaries gone by, I've seen nothing that challenges the conventional conclusions, that asks questions about the things we've been told to accept as fact.
Personally, I remember very little directly — although, over the years, I think I've persuaded myself that I remember more than I actually do. Then, as now, I was only a few days from my birthday. In 1963, I wasn't even in elementary school yet. I was about to celebrate my fourth birthday.
In those days, my family didn't have a television set, but our neighbors did. And I vividly remember spending the next four days in our neighbors' small home, but I spent little of it with my parents in front of the TV. I was too busy playing with the neighbor boy, who always seemed to have the coolest new toys.
As young as I was — and as focused as I was on my friend's toy collection — I doubt that I saw Lyndon Johnson make his brief address to the nation upon returning to Washington. And I probably didn't see Kennedy's casket being removed from the plane and taken back to the White House.
I probably didn't see Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald a couple of days later, and I probably didn't see John-John salute his father's casket the day of the funeral.
I simply don't remember what I saw and what I didn't see in 1963. But I know I've seen footage of all those events many times in the years since.
Mostly, as I've gotten older, the belief that our nation has been lied to about what happened in Dallas has continued to grow. And nothing that I've heard has changed that feeling.
For myself and for those who died before getting the answers they sought, I wonder if those answers will ever be found.
I'm not one of those who believes, as has so often been said, that America "lost its innocence" on that day. The people of my parents' generation, who were in their early 30s when President Kennedy was killed, had been through far too much in their lives — the Depression, Pearl Harbor, Nazi Germany, segregation, the Cold War — to lose their innocence. It was mostly gone by that time.
My sense of that time was that the adults felt an opportunity had been lost — perhaps the kind of opportunity that comes along only once in a generation.
Today, on the 45th anniversary, the only TV station I've discovered that is showing anything related to the assassination is American Movie Classics, which is showing Oliver Stone's "JFK" tonight at 7 and 11 Central. It's a well done film and it raises some important questions — but the film was made 17 years ago and those issues still haven't been resolved.
I have written about the absence of anniversary observations in the media in my Birth of a Notion blog.
But the question I'd like to ask here is simply this: Is the JFK assassination still relevant?
Does November 22 belong — once and for all — in the archives with all the important dates in history, even with questions unanswered?
Or should we continue to search for those answers?
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