In today's on-line Christian Science Monitor, Peter Grier asks Why is Pres. Kennedy still so popular? and in the article, writes --
Maybe it's because Kennedy, even now, so embodies that era's palpable sense of freshness and promise. The youngest man elected to the presidency, Kennedy smiles brightly in those photos from Dallas from before his fateful turn near the Texas School Book Depository. On the morning of Nov. 22, 1963, Americans were upbeat about him and about the nation, points out Andrew Kohut, founding director of the Pew Research Center. Fully 82 percent thought America's power would increase in 1963. Sixty-four percent said business conditions were good.
"The mood of America then had few parallels with the modern era," writes Mr. Kohut.
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In 1988 Lance Morrow wrote in TIME about the year 1968: "History cracked open; bats came flapping out, dark surprises.
...Nineteen sixty-eight was a knife blade that severed past from future,
Then from Now;
the Then of triumphant postwar American power in the world, the Then of the nation's illusions of innocence and virtue, from the more complicated Now that began when the U.S. saw it was losing a war it should not have been fighting in the first place, when the huge tribe of the young revolted against the nation's elders and authority, and when the nation finished killing its heroes."
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A Nov. 21, 2013 article by Mark Feeney in The Boston Globe is headlined "Kennedy murder a breakpoint in time."
That "breakpoint in time" phrase brings to mind
"history cracked open..." and
"...a knife blade that severed past from future"...
Feeney article:
On Nov. 21, 1963, John F. Kennedy gave a speech in San Antonio. Americans "stand on the edge of a great era," the president declared, "filled with both crisis and opportunity, an era to be characterized by achievement and challenge."
Those words might be written off as standard presidential boilerplate, uplifting rhetoric of the sort that Kennedy did so well.
Except that, because of what happened the next day, they can't be written off. Those words assume an eerie prescience. A new era, gruesome as well as great, followed Kennedy's assassination.
The 1960s, as state of mind and cultural epoch, had arrived.
Kennedy's death didn't trigger that era. Demographic trends, economic growth, technological advances, and much else besides combined to produce the upheaval that was the '60s. But that awful day in Dallas retains enormous symbolic importance as touchstone: marking a boundary between a
pre-assassination Then and a post-assassination Now,
a now that in significant ways remains with us.
The shock of Kennedy's death eventually faded. Shock always does. Yet the
confusion and suspicion that followed haven't. They've become part of our cultural climate.
We have not only grown accustomed to doubt and skepticism but come to expect them -- so, too, with a normalization of violence and expectation of random direness.
Phrases like "conspiracy theory" and "distrust of government" were rarely if ever heard prior to Nov. 22, 1963.
Soon enough they became commonplace. That a popular '90s television series, "The X-Files," would have three recurring characters known as the Lone Gunmen wasn't necessarily surprising. (They even got a brief-lived spinoff series.) The trio could have as easily been called the Grassy Knolls or the Oswald Patsies. Assassination terminology, with its weird blend of the sinister and casual, had long ago entered everyday vocabulary.
...The great legacy of the assassination is how many people take for granted that the only place to find the truth is outside the public square. Or as the "X-Files" tagline has it,
"The truth is out there." Dealey Plaza is where "out there" begins.
...Our national horror stories subsequent to the assassination at least had redeeming elements: the bravery of soldiers in Vietnam, the way Watergate demonstrated the system worked, the heroism and sacrifice of New York firefighters and Flight 93 passengers on 9/11. Sometimes the redemption takes time to come out, as with the success of Tony Mendez's hostage-rescue mission, portrayed in "Argo."...Not the Kennedy assassination....Even something as basic as conclusiveness would qualify...."We know who did it. We know how he did it. We know why he did it. Okay? That's that." Nothing like that was forthcoming.
Kennedy's assassination was a political act and historical event. Its failure to resolve itself was, and still is,
a cultural phenomenon.
There have been so many investigations of the assassination, starting with the Warren Commission: by journalists, authors, obsessives, even the House Select Committee on Assassinations, in the late '70s. The name sounds like the title of a Philip K. Dick novel. The sum of the answers they tried to give, and the further doubts they raised, contributed even more to how what happened in Dallas has ramified than the actual killing did.
That cultural phenomenon has a pair of defining texts, its Old Testament and New: the 26 volumes of the Warren Commission report, with its finding that Oswald acted alone; and the Zapruder film, the 26.6 seconds of 8mm home-movie footage shot by Dallas clothing manufacturer Abraham Zapruder, with its recording of the actual event. One created the post-assassination landscape. The other, as some saw it, offered the promise of revelation, an answer at last.
The Warren Commission report offers the truth, such as it is, handed down from on high. Commission members included the chief justice of the United States, eminent leaders of Congress, and a former head of the Central Intelligence Agency.
It's one measure of how vastly the assassination changed the United States that the idea of a past CIA director being part of any comparable investigation now is inconceivable.
The truth may or may not be out there, but wherever it is, the CIA is not to be trusted with it.
The report was obsolete the moment it was published,
an overdetermined, contradictory, confusing, and often-implausible monument to what [author Don] DeLillo has called "the endless fact-rubble of the investigation." DeLillo has likened the report to a nonfiction counterpart to James Joyce's famously hermetic novel, "Finnegans Wake."
The Zapruder film has no counterpart.
What counterpart could it have? The film's opaque brevity is as confusing as the report's numbing immensity and claim to finality. In fact, the report's attempts to interpret the film are no small part of the confusion, as the commission attempted to explain why the backward jerk of the president's body didn't suggest a bullet fired from somewhere other than Oswald's perch. The phrase "magic bullet" entered the post-assassination lexicon. Yet precisely because of that capacity to confuse, the 486 Zapruder frames possess an ongoing relevance and suggestiveness given to very few works, let alone one intrinsically artless and inexpressive.
...For years, the film was impossible to see.
Life magazine had bought it from Zapruder, a great journalistic coup -- except that it wasn't. To protect the magazine's investment as well as
for reasons of decency,
the film was never shown. But everyone knew about it. It was widely discussed and referred to. Individual frames and sequences were reproduced in Life and elsewhere. It was kind of like atmosphere:
invisible yet everywhere.
Inaccessibility made the Zapruder film seem at once dubious (not seeing is not believing) and all the more authoritative (evidence that's impossible to see is evidence that's impossible to refute).
Now you can see it on YouTube. In slow motion? Digitized? Zoomed in? With Dictabelt soundtrack? Hosted by Geraldo Rivera? Take your pick. The footage is there among countless cat videos and karaoke numbers and the latest viral sensations. All access, all the time. Ho hum. Except that 50 years later
viewing it remains utterly unnerving --
and stays so, no matter how many times you watch it. The horror of watching the impact of the second bullet, in frame 313, cannot be exaggerated.
Watching the footage is unnerving for another reason: how familiar it seems. A Zapruder aesthetic, as one might call it, long ago emerged: low-res, dreamlike, handheld [camera],
voyeuristic (the subjects unaware they are being filmed), affectless, detached, so visually unknowing as to seem (to sophisticated eyes) the height of knowingness, marked by unmediated violence and reliance on shock. Aspects of the aesthetic are there in Warhol's underground films, cinema-verité documentary, Hollywood paranoid thrillers, video games (the violence and shock), security-camera and drone footage.
Abraham Zapruder went out that day intending to take a home movie to show to his family. What he ended up with was something incalculably different, a piece of history unlike any other. Except that
it did turn out to be a home movie, too:
everyone's home,
everyone's movie.
------------------------- [excerpts from "Kennedy murder a breakpoint in time," written by Mark Feeney, 11-21-13, Boston Globe]
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