What Is Left

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The building itself

The Texas School Book Depository is a Dallas County office building. It was leased to the book company until 1970, the county took it on after a good deal of public argument, and the restoration finished in 1981 with the outside put back to how it looked in 1901. The lower floors are county administration. People park, badge in, and process paperwork in the most notorious building in America, and have done for forty years.^{1, 2}

The top two floors stayed empty through all of that. The Sixth Floor Museum opened on Presidents’ Day, the twentieth of February 1989. Twenty-five years after the Warren Report, and only then. It took a quarter of a century for the city to decide that the room the shots were fired from should be a place you could walk into and look out of, rather than a floor nobody used.³

When Oliver Stone came to shoot in 1991 he could not use the sixth floor, because by then the sixth floor was a museum with an exhibition installed in it. So he took the empty seventh. The most reproduced image of that window in the world was staged one story above the real one, because the real one had already become a place you buy a ticket for.^{4, 5}

The production dressed the whole place backwards. False breeze blocks in the window bays. False railroad track and gravel in the parking lot. A replica Depository sign over the front door and replica boards listing the publishers who had offices inside in 1963. The city agreed to temporary period street signs across the plaza. For a few weeks in 1991 Dealey Plaza looked more like November 1963 than it had at any point since.^{6, 5}

Dallas had spent nearly thirty years being called the city of hate, and here was a film crew putting the whole thing back in the street. A city councilman, Al Lipscomb, said letting them do it was a good therapeutic enema. A purge, so there would be no residue of the past. That is a remarkable thing for an elected official to say out loud about his own city, and it is closer to how Dallas actually handled this than anything written about it from outside.⁷

About 400,000 people a year go up to that floor. Visitor numbers rose after the film came out, which is its own small argument about what actually sends people to a historical site. They line up, they look out of a window at a road, and a great many of them say the same thing on the way down. That it is much smaller than they expected, and that the shot is much shorter than they thought.⁸

The movie theater he was arrested in is still a movie theater. The Texas Theatre opened in Oak Cliff in 1931, was restored and reopened in 2010, was renovated again a decade later, and shows films seven days a week. You can buy a ticket, walk in, and sit down. People go there to watch new releases and have no idea. Of all the places in this story it is the only one you can still use for the thing it was built for.⁹

In my twenties I used to buy videos and magazines from a folding table on that grass. Robert Groden has been selling them in the plaza for decades, and being moved on for it for nearly as long. I would ask him questions. I always had the feeling he had decided I was intelligence of some kind, which I suspect says more about how flat I come across than anything else. He would answer anyway. Politely. Every time.^{10, 11}

Here is what I did not understand at the time. The copy of the Zapruder film that went out on national television in 1975, the broadcast that started all of this for me as a child, came from Robert Groden. He was the one who got it on air. So the man I was buying videos from, off a table on the grass, in my twenties, is the reason I had ever seen the thing at all.^{12, 13, 14}

The plaque

Walk the north side of Elm Street, past the garden steps, and there is a bronze plaque set flat into a slab of Texas pink granite, level with the ground so that you would step over it if you were not looking. It is from the National Park Service. Dealey Plaza is a National Historic Landmark, and this is the marker that says so.¹⁵

This is the entire text. Dealey Plaza has been designated a National Historic Landmark. This site possesses national significance in commemorating the history of the United States of America. Nineteen ninety-three. National Park Service, United States Department of the Interior. Read it again, because of what is not in it. It never says what happened here.¹⁵

No Kennedy. No twenty-second of November. No assassination, no shooting, no death. The official marker at the place where an American president was murdered in front of his wife describes the site as possessing national significance in commemorating history, which is a sentence that could be bolted to the ground almost anywhere. Everything about that plaza is precise except the one thing the government wrote down.¹⁵

The dates matter too. The Secretary of the Interior signed the designation on the twelfth of October 1993 and it was dedicated in the plaza on the twenty-second of November that year, thirty years to the day. For three decades the most photographed hundred yards in America carried no official marker at all. The city had not wanted one, and when one finally came it was set flush with the grass and worded so that it could offend nobody.¹⁵

I keep coming back to it because it is this entire book compressed into forty words. A record that exists and does not say the thing. Precise about everything except the point. Findable, official, permanent, and silent on the one question anybody standing there is asking. Somebody chose that wording, the same way somebody chose the word in the statute, and nobody has ever had to explain either.¹⁵

The shelf

I have spent this whole book asking you to check me, and I have not told you what to check me against. So here is the shelf. There are perhaps two thousand books on this subject and most of them are worthless, either because they repeat each other or because they were written to sell a theory. Maybe eight matter. I am going to name them, including the ones that argue against everything I have said.¹⁶

The first that mattered came in 1966, from the lawyer you have already met in this book as a man with an F.B.I. file. Mark Lane’s book went through the Commission’s evidence the way a defense attorney would, arguing the case that was never made because there was never a trial. It was a bestseller in a dozen countries and it is the reason the doubts became public rather than academic. It is also advocacy, and reads like it, and he was wrong about a good deal.¹⁷

The same year a graduate student did something smarter and it has aged better. Rather than re-argue the evidence, Edward Jay Epstein went and interviewed the Commission’s own staff about how they had worked. What he found was a body of part-time lawyers, operating on somebody else’s investigators, under enormous pressure to finish. He barely accused anybody of anything and did far more damage than the books that did. Attack the method and you do not have to attack the men.¹⁸

And now the person I most want you to know about. The Commission published twenty-six volumes of hearings and exhibits with no index, which meant that in practice nobody could find anything in them. A New York woman named Sylvia Meagher, working in her own time and at her own expense, built one. Then she wrote a book of her own. Every single researcher who has worked this case since, on either side of the argument, has stood on that index.^{19, 20}

One more from that decade, and it is the ancestor of what I have tried to do here. Josiah Thompson was a philosophy professor who got access to the film and went through it frame by frame, measuring head movement and timing rather than arguing about motive. He concluded there were three shooters, which I do not accept. But the method is right. Measure the thing, publish the numbers, let somebody else check them. He was still working on it in his nineties.²¹

Now the other side, and you should read it. In 1993 Gerald Posner published a book arguing the official account is essentially correct, and it forced the field to raise its standards. In 2007 the prosecutor from that televised trial published a single volume of about sixteen hundred pages, with another thousand of endnotes on a disc, going at every conspiracy claim one at a time. Both have errors. Both are serious. Anybody who has not read them is arguing with a version of the case that nobody defends.^{22, 23}

Here is the test I use and you can use it on this book as well. Does it give you a document number you can go and pull. Does it tell you which of its claims are contested and by whom. Does it say anywhere what would change the author’s mind. And does it include the evidence that cuts against its own argument. A book that does all four can still be wrong. A book that does none of them is not really a book about evidence at all.¹⁶

What it became

I have spent this entire book on documents and measurements, and I should admit what that leaves out. Almost nobody alive first met this story that way. They met it in a film, a novel, a song, a joke on television, or a phrase somebody used without knowing where it came from. The culture is not a footnote to this case. For most people it is the case, and it has been doing its work for sixty years while the paperwork sat in boxes.¹⁶

Start with the smallest thing and it is the largest. A grassy knoll is now an English expression. People use it about company mergers and football transfers and things their neighbor said, and a great many of them could not tell you it is a strip of lawn in Texas about the size of a garden. That is what total cultural absorption looks like. A place became a figure of speech for the idea that the official story is not the story.¹⁶

Two novels matter. In 1988 Don DeLillo published a book about Oswald that is not a thriller and does not solve anything, and its argument is that the man was assembled out of other people’s plans and half understood his own life. That was four years before the Records Act. In 2011 Stephen King sent a man back through a hole in time to stop it, and wrote three hundred pages about how difficult it is to know anything about a person, which is an odd thing for a horror novelist to be right about.^{24, 25}

In March 2020, in the first week of a global lockdown, Bob Dylan released a song about the assassination that runs nearly seventeen minutes, has almost no tune, and is mostly a list. It went to number one, which no record of his had ever done, and he was seventy-eight. Fifty-seven years after the event, in a week when the world had other things on its mind, the largest audience that man ever had chose to spend seventeen minutes on Dealey Plaza.²⁶

Six weeks after Oliver Stone’s film opened, an American sitcom did a scene in which two men reconstruct, in slow motion and in the exact language of the Warren Commission, the trajectory of a mouthful of spit at a baseball game. Back and to the left. A second spitter. It is a straight parody of the single-bullet theory and it is very funny, and for an enormous number of people it is the only encounter with that argument they will ever have.²⁷

That is worth stopping on, because it is a real problem for anybody doing what I am doing. You can answer a book with a book. There is no answer to a joke. Once a proposition has been made ridiculous, the people who found it ridiculous are finished with it, and no amount of survey data reopens the question. A good parody does not defeat an argument. It removes the audience, which is worse and permanent.¹⁶

So here is the position this book is actually in. There is a documentary record, which is dull, partial and hard, and there is a folklore, which is vivid, complete and beautifully made by some of the best writers and film-makers of the age. They are competing for the same space in people’s heads and the folklore is winning, because it is better made and always will be. I am not complaining about that. I am telling you what any book like mine is up against, including this one.¹⁶

The accounting

You can go and look at it. The car is in a museum in Dearborn, Michigan, behind a rope, a few feet from where families walk past. After Dallas it was stripped, fitted with armor and a permanent roof, repainted from midnight blue to black, and put straight back into service. Johnson rode in it. Nixon rode in it. Ford rode in it. Carter rode in it. Four more presidents used the car a president was murdered in, and it was not retired until 1977.^{28, 29}

The aircraft that carried him to Texas and carried his body home is in a hangar in Dayton, Ohio, and the public walks through the cabin. To load the casket they had to take out a bulkhead. It went on carrying presidents for another thirty-five years and was not retired until 1998. The place where a Texas judge swore in a new president, on the ground at Love Field, is a spot on a carpet you can stand on for the price of admission.³⁰

The suit is in a windowless, climate-controlled room in Maryland, in an acid-free container, unwashed. Her mother sent it to the government in 1964. In 2003 her daughter signed it over on one condition: that it not be put on public display for a hundred years. That takes it to 2103, and the family can extend. Somebody decided that the most famous garment of the century should be preserved and never looked at.³¹

†The matching hat is missing. It was last recorded in the hands of her personal secretary and after that the trail stops. Not seized, not destroyed, not sealed for a hundred years. Just lost, the way things are lost, by people with a great deal else on their minds. Of everything in this story that has been argued over, the item that genuinely vanished is a pillbox hat.^{32, 33}

The original is in refrigerated storage at a federal archive in Maryland and it is not projected. Every version anybody has ever watched. Every documentary, every frame in every book, every argument on the internet. Comes from copies. The object itself is treated as too fragile to run through a projector again. The most watched twenty-six seconds in history sits in the cold, in the dark, unwatched.³⁴

The rifle. The bullet from the stretcher. The three shells. The paper bag. A section of curb cut out of Main Street. The camera. The film. His clothing. Almost every physical object this entire argument rests on is held by one federal agency, cataloged, with a number, in the same collection. Sixty years of dispute about a plaza in Texas, resolved down to a shelf list in Maryland.³⁵

Do the arithmetic. Anyone who was twenty on that sidewalk is in their eighties now. Anyone who was thirty is in their nineties. The agents, the officers, the reporters, the people who gave testimony. That generation has almost entirely gone. What is left is the children. The boys on the grass who were four and two. The girl who was ten and running. The last people who will ever say I was there are the ones who were too young to understand what they were watching.^{36, 37}

And here is the part almost nobody knows. The suit was kept. The hat was not. She was wearing a matching pillbox that morning, as recognizable as the suit in every photograph taken before the shooting, and it is not in Maryland and it is not anywhere. The last documented hands it was in belonged to her personal secretary, and after that the record simply stops. The most photographed hat of the twentieth century, and nobody can tell you where it is.³⁸

What they destroyed

I have been careful in this book to separate two things that get treated as one. There is material that was lost, by ordinary incompetence and ordinary filing, and there is material that somebody destroyed on purpose. Both leave the same hole. Only one of them is a decision. Let me put the deliberate ones in one place, because collected they are worse than they look scattered.¹⁶

This is the one that should not be possible. In 1995 a federal review board created by Congress was gathering everything on this case. It wrote to the Secret Service. And in January of that year, after being told the Board wanted them, the Service destroyed boxes of protective survey reports covering presidential trips in the fall of 1963. Not in the panic of that November. In 1995, under a records statute, with a federal body asking.³⁹

And consider what a protective survey report is. It is the document an advance team writes about a trip: the route, the buildings, the threats known about, what was done in response. Which means the destroyed files are precisely the ones that would tell you what the Service knew about Chicago, and about Tampa, and what it had been told before Dallas. The Board recorded that it happened and had no power to undo it. That material is simply gone.⁴⁰

Here is another, and it is stranger than it sounds. The bronze casket the President’s body traveled from Dallas in was damaged and was never used for the burial. It sat in storage. In February 1966, by arrangement with the family, it was loaded onto an aircraft, flown out over the Atlantic, weighted, and dropped into about nine thousand feet of water. The reason given was to stop it ever becoming an exhibit or a relic, which is entirely understandable and also means it cannot now be examined.⁴¹

So here they are together. An agent flushed a note from the accused down a lavatory. A doctor burned his original autopsy notes in his fireplace. The brain is not in the Archives. A piece of the skull recovered the next day is not there either. The car was rebuilt within months. The casket is in the ocean. And a federal agency destroyed the relevant trip files in 1995. Every one of those has an innocent explanation attached to it, and I have given most of them fairly.^{40, 42}

Now the honest part. Any one of those, alone, is a bad day in a bureaucracy. All of them together is a pattern, and I am not going to pretend it is not. But a pattern of institutions protecting themselves is not the same as a pattern of institutions hiding a murder, and these are exactly the things a nervous organization destroys when it fears being blamed for a failure. That explains all of it, and it is unsatisfying, and it might still be right.¹⁶

What outlives us

Do the arithmetic and it is sobering. A person who was thirty in that plaza would be over ninety now. A child held up to see the car is in their seventies. The agents are gone, the doctors are mostly gone, the police who were on that street are gone. Within a few years there will be nobody alive who saw it happen, and shortly after that nobody alive who remembers the afternoon at all. This is the last decade in which any of this is living memory.¹⁶

When the last person who was there dies, this stops being something you can ask about and becomes something you can only look up. No more corrections from somebody who was standing on that grass. No more, actually it was not like that. From that point every argument about this is an argument between documents, and the documents are the ones that happened to survive, which as this book has shown you is not the same as the ones that mattered.¹⁶

And the place goes on being a road. Cars use Elm Street every day. People walk across the crosses to get to work. There is a museum on the sixth floor with four hundred thousand visitors a year, and directly beneath it a county office where people file paperwork. The city has never quite decided what it wants that ground to be, and the result is that it is not a monument. It is a junction with a museum in it.^{43, 44}

It took me years to stop being offended by that. Now I think it is the correct answer, and I think it by accident rather than by anybody’s design. A roped-off shrine would let you look at it. A working street makes you stand in it, step out of the way of a car, and understand how ordinary the distances are. Nothing has taught more people the truth about that place than having to check for traffic while they stood on it.¹⁶

Here is what I would want to be there in 2126, when everybody now alive is gone. The film, kept cold, and copies everywhere so it cannot be lost. The survey table, because measurement outlives argument. Every document with its number attached, so a person can pull the page instead of pulling a quotation. And a model of that plaza accurate enough that somebody who can never go there can still stand on the corner and understand how small it is.¹⁶

And a thing I would be content to see disappear. The two thousand books that argue with each other rather than with the record. The certainty on both sides. The lists of names with no denominator, the deathbed confessions, the odds calculated from the wrong question. None of that is knowledge. It is sixty years of people talking, and it has crowded out an enormous amount of ordinary work that nobody did because arguing was more interesting.¹⁶

Everything else in this story is expiring. The witnesses, the paper, the film stock, the people who could still be asked. One thing is not. The slope of that road, the height of that window, the distance from the fence to the crosses. Those numbers will be exactly the same in a hundred years as they were on the twenty-second of November 1963, and anybody, at any point, can go and check them. That is the whole reason this book was built the way it was, and it is the last honest thing I have before I tell you what I think.¹⁶

† disputed   ‡ theory   § reconstructed — everything unmarked is established. Superscript numbers key to the sources below. Corrections

Sources for this chapter

44 sources. Every claim above is keyed to one of them. The complete list for the whole book runs to 1,276.

1. Dallas County property records
2. The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, published building history
3. The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, founding record, 20 February 1989
4. The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, collections notes on the 1991 production
5. contemporary Dallas press coverage, 1991
6. The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, collections notes and production props
7. Al Lipscomb, quoted in contemporary Dallas reporting on the 1991 production
8. The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, published visitor figures
9. The Texas Theatre, Dallas, published history and programme
10. personal, the narrator's own account
11. Groden's long-running dispute with the City of Dallas over vending in the plaza
12. personal
13. Groden supplied the Zapruder film copy broadcast on Goodnight America, March 1975
14. Groden served as a photographic consultant to the HSCA
15. National Park Service, Dealey Plaza National Historic Landmark designation, 12 October 1993
16. the author's assessment
17. Mark Lane, Rush to Judgment, 1966
18. Edward Jay Epstein, Inquest, 1966
19. Sylvia Meagher, Subject Index to the Warren Report and Hearings and Exhibits, 1966
20. Sylvia Meagher, Accessories After the Fact, 1967
21. Josiah Thompson, Six Seconds in Dallas, 1967
22. Gerald Posner, Case Closed, 1993
23. Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History, 2007
24. Don DeLillo, Libra, 1988
25. Stephen King, 11/22/63, 2011
26. Bob Dylan, Murder Most Foul, released March 2020
27. Seinfeld, The Boyfriend, first broadcast February 1992
28. The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation, accession record for SS-100-X
29. Secret Service vehicle records
30. National Museum of the United States Air Force, aircraft 62-6000 (SAM 26000)
31. National Archives and Records Administration, deed of gift, 2003
32. National Archives holdings record
33. Mary Gallagher, My Life with Jacqueline Kennedy, 1969
34. National Archives and Records Administration, Zapruder film camera original, RG 272
35. National Archives, JFK Assassination Records Collection, RG 272
36. Warren Commission witness list, 1964
37. ages as recorded in contemporary testimony
38. accounts of the disposition of the clothing worn on 22 November 1963
39. Assassination Records Review Board final report, 1998, chapter on compliance
40. Assassination Records Review Board final report, 1998
41. records of the disposal of the original casket, declassified 1999
42. HSCA final report 1979
43. Sixth Floor Museum visitor figures
44. the author's visits to Dealey Plaza