Television's First Live Murder

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Fifty years ago, plans were being finalized in Washington for John F. Kennedy's funeral the next day.

Back in Texas, churches in Dallas were holding their usual Sunday services under most unusual circumstances. At Dallas' Northaven Methodist Church, Rev. Bill Holmes gave a sermon that is still talked about half a century later. Holmes told the congregation that Dallas could not avoid its own responsibility for the assassination even if only one man pulled the trigger.

As Holmes spoke, the suspect in Kennedy's assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald, was gunned down while being transferred from police headquarters to Dallas County's jail. The TV networks provided live coverage so some folks who were watching their TVs instead of attending church to pray for the Kennedys saw Oswald get shot by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner.

"The killing occurred in the presence of 70 uniformed Dallas policemen," wrote historian William Manchester. "Because NBC was televising the transfer, it was also television's first live murder."

That shooting left a gaping wound in the American experience that probably will never heal.

Because Oswald's death meant some questions will remain unanswered — no matter what kind of evidence is uncovered. There were questions that only Oswald could have answered. Investigators might have been able to establish whether he spoke the truth or not. But without Oswald's testimony — like the forensic evidence that was lost when the limousine was cleaned of blood spatter and John Connally's suit was sent to the dry cleaners — the case will forever remain unresolved.

Nothing that has been uncovered in the last half–century has definitively established the guilt or innocence of anyone.

The killing of Oswald short–circuited the American judicial system. Admittedly, it doesn't always work, but it was the only hope to get Oswald's side of the story. Maybe he would have told the truth. Maybe he wouldn't. That is the kind of thing that juries must decide, and, most of the time, jurors simply have to hope that they have seen and heard enough evidence to reach the right conclusion.

That hope was snuffed out by Ruby, acting as judge, jury and executioner, 50 years ago today — but that is only if one accepts what he said at the time. Conspiracy theorists cite Ruby's organized crime connections and speculate he was sent to rub out Oswald to keep him from talking.

In the words of John Pope of the New Orleans Times–Picayune, Oswald's death "opened the floodgates to a tsunami of speculation about Kennedy's murder." Is it any wonder that JFK conspiracy theories have found a welcome audience from an America still seeking closure for what happened here 50 years ago?

Three previous American presidents had been killed by assassins. The American public managed to achieve closure with two of them when the accused assassins were arrested, charged and eventually convicted. The absence of an assassin to convict, to hold responsible leaves a wound that does not heal easily.

The first presidential assassin, John Wilkes Booth, was killed before he could be brought to trial, which was another supposed link between the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy (a list of such links has been making the rounds almost since the day Kennedy was killed, but many of the items on the list have been discredited). And, to a degree, I suppose, the assassination of Lincoln by a Southern sympathizer led to more than a decade of abuse, known to history as the Reconstruction era. Was that because there was no formal trial for Booth? I don't know.

No one disputed that Booth shot Lincoln. There was a theater full of witnesses who saw Booth leap from Lincoln's box after the shooting. I have heard of no credible witnesses who could identify Oswald as the man who fired at Kennedy from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.

"It would have been easier for the American people to accept any enemy, any conspiracy, any plot and then avenge John F. Kennedy," Theodore White wrote. "But what they had to face was an act of unreason, avenged by an individual act of obscenity."

That "act of obscenity" was witnessed by millions and captured on film. There was no doubt about who killed Oswald.

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But doubts about who killed John F. Kennedy have lingered now for half a century.

I believe they will linger forever.

Will We Ever Know the Truth About JFK?

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President and Mrs. Kennedy disembark in Dallas.

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In a little more than two months, it will be the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy here in Dallas.

It goes without saying that it was a traumatic event for this country — particularly so for this city (my grandmother always regarded it as a black eye for Dallas) — and I suppose many people have lived for years, probably decades, with a desire to know the real story of what happened that day. Perhaps they, like my grandmother, believe that whoever pulled the trigger couldn't possibly be local because, well, everybody knew that folks from Dallas wouldn't do that kind of thing — even though Dallas in general was known to be hostile to the administration.

Initially, I guess, a majority of Americans accepted the Warren Commission's conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman. That was how most Americans were raised in those days — to respect authority and accept its word on everything (the deceit of the Johnson and Nixon presidencies would go a long way toward eroding that inclination).

At the dawn of the 1960s, conformity was in fashion in America, just as it had been (and still was) in the European cultures from which many Americans' ancestors had come — and they, like all other immigrants before and since, brought their values with them.

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After the home movie that Abraham Zapruder made that day went public a few years later, suspicions rapidly grew among Americans that the Kennedy assassination had been part of some sort of conspiracy. America had been souring on the Vietnam war, and the pump was primed for conspiracy theories to flourish.

A general consensus arose that the true story had not been told, either by omission or commission, and that view gained some momentum in the mid–1970s when a special congressional committee evaluated the evidence from prominent assassinations in the 1960s — President Kennedy, his brother Bobby and Martin Luther King — and determined that it was probable that there had been more than one gunman in Dealey Plaza that day.

I guess that is the only thing that many Americans agreed on — and, I will admit, I was one of them. There is little agreement about who was responsible — some say the CIA, some say organized crime, others say Cubans, still others say right–wing extremists. Some of the more elaborate scenarios combine two or more.

I use the past tense — was — for myself not because I now believe the Warren Commission (I don't), but because I believe that, whether the Warren Commission was right or wrong, it doesn't matter now. Too much time has passed, too many material witnesses are deceased or suffering from dementia, and we will never know what the truth is.

Some people will never believe that. They will keep searching for the truth, and I do hope they find it, but I have strong doubts that anyone ever will.

Some people will insist that they already know the truth. I have dealt with such people all my life — on some subjects, I must admit, I am one of those people — and I have learned that it is usually futile to attempt to change their minds.

And who knows? They might be right — as one of my favorite journalists, H.L. Mencken, liked to say in letters to angry readers.

Perhaps Lee Harvey Oswald did shoot Kennedy. Perhaps he did act alone. I don't know. What I do know is that there have been unanswered questions from the start. Granted, some of the questions eventually received plausible answers, but it has often seemed in the Kennedy case that, whenever a single question has been answered, it has raised two new questions, and we seemed to drift farther from the truth than we were before.

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Not even the best mystery writer could invent as many red herrings and dead–end leads as there have been in this case over the years. It is alleged that many of these were the results of sloppy investigative work or human error or even coincidence.

If Oswald really did act alone, it is hard to imagine the investigation into the murder of any president being handled as sloppily — or as many coincidences occurring. There has been plenty of doubt about the number of shooters — heck, even the number of shots — in Dealey Plaza that day, and it did take the Dallas police an inexcusably long time to seal off the Texas Schoolbook Depository after the shots were fired and the consensus among witnesses was that at least some of those shots had been fired from that building.

Maybe there are simple explanations for things that appear to be so clearly sinister. I am a defender of our legal system in spite of its flaws, and I know things are not always how they seem — but, really, so many? It defies logic and common sense.

Suppose Oswald had not been killed but had lived to face trial. America's legal history is filled with cases where juries acted differently than many observers expected. How many times in your life have you heard of a verdict that was contrary to public opinion? That was one of the things I learned during my days on the police beat. You can never tell what a jury will do, but you can be sure that someone won't like it.

No one knows what a jury might have said about the case against Oswald. The closest we came was the case brought by Jim Garrison in New Orleans that was re–enacted in Oliver Stone's "JFK." That trial was only a few years after the assassination, when the trail presumably was still warm, and it resulted in an acquittal.

In 2013, it is a decidedly cold case, and I believe it will remain so.

In (almost) the words of a once–popular TV show, the truth may be out there. I just don't think that, at this stage, anyone will find it.

Caught in the Cross Hairs of History

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A picture is worth a thousand words, the old saying goes.

And some pictures are worth a lot more than that. Some pictures are iconic. They are the images that come springing to mind when one thinks of an important event — like the 9/11 attacks or the Apollo 11 moon landing.

Or the JFK assassination.

As you may or may not know, this year marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy. It's a big event here in Dallas. For months now, the Dallas Morning News website has been featuring a special link to an observance of the anniversary. A local commemoration is planned around the anniversary.

I expect, when the anniversary is only days or weeks away, many TV stations/networks will run retrospectives on the assassination and the Kennedy presidency. Schoolchildren may write essays on the Kennedy presidency and/or the assassination.

Since January alone, I've already seen part or all of Oliver Stone's "JFK" more times than I can count.

Some of the images from that event are iconic — shots of the Kennedy motorcade as it approaches the killing zone, shots of the Schoolbook Depository, the shot of Lyndon Johnson taking the oath of office on board Air Force One, shots from the day JFK was buried.

I've heard some people say that the photo of the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, being gunned down in the basement of the Dallas city jail two days after the assassination by Dallas night club owner Jack Ruby is an iconic shot for them — and, to a certain extent, it is for me, too. A photo of that moment won a Pulitzer Prize.

I suppose the iconic part for me is the way the cop on the left is kind of pulling away at an angle, as if he wants to be sure he is out of range of the bullet — with his mouth contorted in that sort of semi–grimace.

The gun, of course, was aimed right at Oswald's belly and at close range. There was no conceivable way that the cop could have been shot. Must have been an instinctive thing — like when the folks in Dealey Plaza hit the deck when shots rang out. I suppose no one could be expected to process so much information that efficiently in a second or two.

Back in November, when the sacrifice of Officer J.D. Tippit on Nov. 22, 1963 was commemorated with a state historical marker, former Dallas homicide detective Jim Leavelle was there and said, when asked about his response to the shooting of Oswald, "You don't have time to let things go through your mind, you react. You do what you got to do. You don't stop to think."

That second or two has taken on a life of its own.

For 50 years, that second in Leavelle's life has been in the cross hairs of history. And today that moment brought the 92–year–old Leavelle more notoriety. Dallas' police chief gave him the Police Commendation Award and renamed the department's Detective of the Year Award in his honor.

"Police Commendation Award" must be something akin to a lifetime achievement award — because Leavelle has been retired since 1975. And I suppose this year was chosen to give it to him because it is the 50th anniversary of the assassination.

And not to be too indelicate about this, but Leavelle is 92 years old. There is certainly no guarantee that he will be around in six months when the actual anniversary comes up. If he is, I'm sure he will be among those who are recognized for the roles they played, however minor, on that day. Can't be that many of them left.

While I readily admit that the image of Leavelle at the moment that Oswald was fatally wounded is dramatic and memorable and will always summarize the shock and confusion of that time in American history, I have to feel Leavelle's role in the assassination was minor.

He was the first to interview Oswald in custody and may have been the last to speak to him — at least when he was conscious. As they were making their way down to the basement and their rendezvous with history, Leavelle said, "Lee, if anybody shoots at you, I hope they're as good a shot as you are."

Oswald replied, "Nobody's going to shoot at me."

But, of course, someone did.

Other than that, other than being handcuffed to Oswald when he was mortally wounded, I know of no other accomplishments in Leavelle's career as a detective. I'm sure he had some in a quarter of a century of service. Most people have accomplishments in their lives.

But few have the photographs to prove it.