Kennedy Museum in Dallas
Last night’s gala dinner at the Mertias conference was held at the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza. I stood on the street the motorcade drove past, then a few minutes later, looked out the same windows Lee Harvey Oswald looked out before he assassinated President Kennedy.
It was overwhelming — standing on historical ground always is. It’s similar to the feeling I had the first time I stepped foot in the White House, the feeling I had when I walked through the U.N., the feeling I had touring the Chartres Cathedral in France.
This was something else: a profound sadness at what could have been. I’m too young to have lived through the Kennedy assassination — but walking through the museum and watching the videos, reading the newsprint made the loss so much more apparent.
Most affecting, interestingly enough, were the photographs on display on the seventh floor (the museum is on the sixth floor, where Oswald’s shots originated). A semi-permanent display of Jacques Lowe’s photographs of JFK — from his day’s running for reelection as a Massachusetts Senator to his days in office — was profound. Many of these photographs (and more) are available in a hardcover book that came out last fall called Remembering Jack: Intimate and Unseen Photographs of the Kennedys. The style of the exhibit was interesting: contact sheets and film strips — so that you saw not just the famous photos (many of which are instantly recognizable, a part of the American DNA) but the moments before and after the shots, when expressions are subtly different, the angle ever so slightly varied.
These pictures made JFK’s energy, enthusiasm and commitment real for me in a way that they hadn’t been before. I just put a copy of Lowe’s book on my wish list, and hopefully will pick it up one of these days — I’d like to spend more time looking through the photos, and reading more about this photographer’s unique view into the Kennedy legacy.
An interesting historical footnote: Lowe’s 40,000 negatives of his years with Kennedy were lost in a vault in the World Trade Center on September 11.
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Comments
I visited the museum about eight years ago. In addition to your sense of the place, I was amazed that Dallas was, in essence, a small southern town at the time. I knew that jim crow was still around, but pictures of the colored / white washrooms and drinking fountains really freaked me out. This was 1963, but even well dressed, wealthy African Americans could get a room in major hotels, or sit in the White-Only areas of restaurants. Only 40 years ago.
Further, I hadn’t realized how hated Kennedy was in Dallas, as reflected in the newspapers on display that were dated immediately prior to the visit.
It was obviously a tragedy for the country as well as personally for the Kennedys, but I do wonder whether JFK could have pushed throught the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Agree w/ your comments about JFK. Here’s an article I wrote last Nov:
Keeping hope of Kennedy years alive
Santa Rosa Press Democrat – November 17, 2003
By David Grabill
A public opinion survey conducted recently by the European Commission came up with some surprising findings: Europeans believe the biggest threat to world peace is Israel, followed closely by the United States, North Korea and Iran.
In Oslo, where my family and I have been living on sabbatical since the summer, the United States would probably be ranked first. The fear, anger and frustration with America is palpable here. While it’s not directed at individual Americans, you can see and hear it in the media and in conversations about world events. You can also feel it walking past the American embassy — people passing by glare at the heavily armed guards, and the guards, fingering the triggers of their machine guns, glare back.
Forty years ago, there was a different perception of the United States in the “old” Europe that our armies helped liberate, and that the Marshall Plan helped to rebuild.
This perception was reinforced by John Kennedy when he became the 34th American president in 1961: “Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage, and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today, at home and around the world.”
Some in my university class, including me, planned to join President Kennedy’s new Peace Corps after graduation and do volunteer work for two years in a far off African or Latin American country. But on the morning of Nov. 22, 1963, over the radio, came an announcement: “President Kennedy has been killed …”
It wasn’t a big surprise that changes followed, but the speed and magnitude of the changes were unexpected.
Within a few months a surly belligerence had replaced the lofty idealism of the New Frontier. The Peace Corps was less attractive as the conflict in Vietnam escalated into a brutal war in which millions of people were killed. Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, sent troops to the Dominican Republic to prop up a corrupt military dictatorship.
Other “little” wars followed. In each of these wars, our government claimed to be fighting to promote freedom and democracy. The success rate of United States’ forces at instilling either freedom or democracy is zero. But along with the troops came the guys in suits working for IT&T, United Fruit, Chevron and Bechtel, Dow, Union Carbide and Halliburton. For them, war’s another name for business opportunity, and their success rate has been up near 100 percent.
We recall the Kennedy presidency as a high watermark of American idealism, when the world was seen as our community, humanity our family, and the challenge was to help transform it so that people everywhere could have an opportunity for a free and decent life.
There were programs that envisioned a cooperative role with countries in Central and South America. There was the nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviet Union that helped pull the world back from the brink of nuclear holocaust and laid a foundation for superpower detente. There were efforts to strengthen the United Nations. There were major advances in the struggles for human rights and economic justice.
Those were remarkable times. Yes, there were mistakes and failures. But no president since then has equaled or even come close to achieving the admiration and respect for the United States and its government throughout the world that John Kennedy engendered.
Recall Kennedy’s visit to Germany in June 1963 when he told an audience of upward of a million people at the wall in West Berlin: “Ich bin ein Berliner.” Today, President Bush would likely be jeered out of the city if he made the same statement.
We sometimes wonder how history would have been written if only the bullets had missed. We’ll never know, so let’s look instead for lessons.
One stands out: Kennedy understood that constructive partnerships with diverse nations are in the long term best interests of the United States and all the world. One country, however powerful, cannot impose its form of government, religion, economic system or social mores on the people of other countries. This is so obvious that it shouldn’t need repeating. But recently President Bush pledged to push countries in the Middle East to institute “democracy”. And last month, an Army general boasted publicly that the war in Iraq showed “our God is stronger than their God.”
People in Europe have good reason to be fearful of the small-minded, power-hungry people running the United States government. But remember also that there was a time 40 years ago when an American president gave us hope that a better world was possible. Let’s keep that hope alive.
David Grabill is a civil rights lawyer from Santa Rosa living in Oslo on sabbatical until June, 2004.