Freaking out in Dallas – 50 years after the death of JFK

Dealey Plaza is freaking me out. I don’t know if it’s the place, or what the human mind brings to the place, but this corner of Dallas is having the same effect on me as all those other places where history hangs too heavy: Berlin’s Holocaust memorial; the slave pens I once saw on a Cuban coffee farm.

All this week the “grassy knoll” from which Abe Zapruder took his footage of the Kennedy assassination has been cluttered with guys like me: reporters trying to re-report on events they were not there for. Cameramen poking their white lenses out of the same window Lee Harvey Oswald must have poked the muzzle of his carcano rifle.

If you stand where the first bullet hit and look up to that window, the distance is startlingly short: maybe 70 metres. And the streetscape of Dallas, even now, after 50 years of frenetic commerce, has a quiet and deserted feeling.

If the past hangs like a shadow over this place it’s for a reason.

This partisan politics is all I’ve known my whole adult life, and in the past two years it’s got worse – Tyler Friske

Back then, Dallas was dubbed the “city of hate”. It had become a magnet for right wing extremists who thought Kennedy was a socialist, that the democrats were about to sell the country to an international conspiracy under the banner of the United Nations and that the national debt was wrong on principle.

There’d been an attack on Adlai Stevenson, America’s UN ambassador, a month before – and leaflets were circulating that accused Kennedy of being a traitor. Lyndon Johnson had been spat on at the city’s plush hotel when he campaigned there.

Just how that climate of fear and anger led communist sympathiser, ex-marine and attempted Soviet defector Lee Oswald to shoot the president we can’t know. He himself was shot two days later while in police custody by a strip club owner on first-name terms with local cops.

‘This is it! The president’s been hit’

Darwin Payne was a staff reporter on the Dallas Times Herald on the day of the shooting. He was in the office, when the man monitoring the police radios shouted: “This is it! The president’s been hit”.

“We were definitely expecting something,” Payne tells me, “not that he would be shot, but maybe a mob would descend on the car, or that he’d be attacked with a placard, or embarrassed. Numerous Dallas politicians warned him not to come.”

For decades the city tried to forget JFK. But the conspiracy theorists would not let it. Each November, on the anniversary of the shootings, they’ve swarmed over the “grassy knoll” – where Zapruder held his camera and where, they believe, a “second shooter” blew the president’s brains out.

On Friday, the conspiracy theorists will be banished from Dealey Plaza. There will be a quiet, respectful ceremony. The tarmac where the bullet strikes were once marked with painted crosses is being re-laid.

The trees from the footage of 1963 are still there, but have grown taller. And the anger and fractiousness that characterised those times is still there too. Also on a bigger scale.

Gun control debate

Last week anti-gun control campaigners took to the grassy knoll (pictured right) to wave their rifles around in public – as the law permits them to – within feet of where Oswald’s bullets slew JFK.

They wore lapel badges depicting Lee Harvey Oswald, and his famous claim “I’m just a patsy”.

They’re part of a coalition of conservative groups in the city known as Activists For Truth. To attend one of their meetings is to understand the full metaphorical significance of the word litany.

Their complaints include that the federal government is putting fluoride in the water; that it has suppressed the truth about JFK; that it is introducing socialism via the healthcare system; that it is sponsoring a “genocide of black people” through its support for abortion rights; that it is covering up what happened at the US embassy in Benghazi; that President Barack Obama is a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood; that he was not born in the USA; that 9/11 was a CIA plot.

This is the kind of paranoia that prevailed among the right in Dallas on the eve of the killing

One eloquent Cuban exile told them that soon they would have to live through a “time of the bombs” – just like in Cuba before the revolution, there would be bombs set off to create tension. Then the government would take away people’s guns. “Come and get them,” was the response.

When I go to Tea Party meetings – for that is what the Alliance for Truth is part of – I try to listen carefully to the nuances of the arguments. And actually the nuances were very clear this week.

The speakers were frustrated that the left-wing Occupy movement had been able to set an agenda on the streets, while they – focused on promoting right wing Republican candidates for congress – had abandoned street protest. “We should have done both”, was the consensus.

When I asked them why so many of their grievances – fluoride, guns, 9/11, Benghazi – involved suppression of the truth, and who was doing it, the answers came in staccato single words: “Bilderberg”; “Rothschild”; “Davos.”

Functionally, the plebeian right’s critique of the US elite draws on the same suspicions as the left’s: that there is a shadowy, unelected, global super-rich elite that wants to take away their liberties, and that elite is personified in President Obama. This is the kind of paranoia that prevailed among the right in Dallas on the eve of the killing.

‘Distrust, anger and violence’

But while Dallas in the 1960s was extreme, today the atmosphere of distrust, anger and violence can be found in the political discourse everywhere. Darwin Payne told me he was worried about the atmosphere in America; that parallels between 1963 and now are not fatuous but valid.

It’s a fact the young find intensely frustrating. At the Southern Methodist University they’ve been studying the JFK assassination. These clean-cut 20-year-olds live in a world of Facebook photos, neat sweatshirts and consensus. To them, the the paranoias of the Kennedy era seem like they should be history – as reassuringly distant as the grainy black and white footage.

But they but keep coming back, in high definition, to blight their lives. “It seems like a lot of things are stalled”, says Rachel Gardner, 19, who’s studying to be a doctor, “because people in politics can’t agree on anything”. Tyler Friske, an engineering student, said: “It’s frustrating. And this partisan politics is all I’ve known my whole adult life, and in the past two years it’s got worse”.

In Dallas, surrounded by JFK memorabilia, I’ve been wondering whether the current mass, public outbreak of paranoia against the federal government, the banking system, the intelligence services and the elite could ever again provoke some cathartic act, as it did in November 1963.

I hope not. And on balance, I think not. In the first place, since the NSA is monitoring the fine grain details of our online lives, you would like to think they might spot a threat like Oswald today with their eyes shut.

As to the plebeian right: its message today on revolt and disobedience is finely calibrated – between defending the right to revolt and actually doing it. Pastor Stephen Broden, a black Republican who failed in his congressional bid here in Dallas two years ago tells me: “The constitution allows us to use arms to abolish a tyrannical government. That’s what guns are for – not hunting.”

But he tells me this is not yet a hard tyranny; it’s a soft tyrrany: “I think we can do it at the ballot box”.

Official right vs plebeian right

If you look closely, the agendas of the official right and the plebeian right are diverging. The bourgeois right wants to shrink the debt, freeze the budget. The folks at Activists for Truth are more excited at the prospect of abolishing the power of the Fed and returning to a dollar backed by silver – that is, abolishing globalisation and a complex credit system altogether.

The elite right wants stronger diplomacy, a bigger military, more powerful intelligence and more decisive leadership. The Tea Party is worried about the millions of dum-dum bullets they believe the government has purchased to use on its citizens. And of course they are appalled by the NSA revelations.

So there are parallels between then and now, but also differences. And a big one concerns the self-confidence of the two beleaguered presidents.

As I stand where Kennedy’s limo passed, I read on my smartphone the speech he was about to give. It is an impassioned tirade against the conservative right of the early 1960s: uncompromising in its insistence, from start to finish, that their obsessions with military action, with the debt, with the size of federal government, were irrational. “We cannot expect that everyone will talk sense”, JFK was about to say, “but we can hope that fewer people will listen to nonsense.”

Kennedy intended to flay the conspiracy theorists and arch cold warriors – and argue from a position of principle and modernity. That’s why he flew into Dallas and flaunted his burnished, Irish, Catholic good looks into the faces of the city’s right-wing protestant elite.

Obama’s presidency

Today the Obama presidency has no such self-confidence. As it staggers from the Syrian debacle to the NSA revelations to the bungled implementation of the new healthcare system, it seems to lack direction full stop.

At root, probably, is the economics. For all the self-loathing the Kennedy murder created in America, its economic model at the time had ten more years to run.

The US economic narrative today is incoherent. Businessmen sweat in the hotel gym alongside me – 15 floors up, at dawn – and they look out into a city that seems, like much of America, to have become a museum of the 20th century.

In Dallas this week it feels like the culture war is on hold. Not just for the JFK commemoration, but to allow both sides of politics to work out what their future project is. The right whittles away at abortion rights, including here in Texas. They look for a candidate that can enthuse the Tea Party but appeal to the middle ground – but they do not find one.

The Democrats quietly note the gentrification of once barren neighbourhoods in a town like this; they point to the gradual rise in the number educated, liberal, professional voters, and of Hispanic voters. They wonder if, even here in Texas, America could be tipping demographically towards the left.

They wonder whether – as their feminist candidate for governor, Wendy Davis, does the rounds in Texas – a left-wing feminist in Washington, in the shape of Elizabeth Warren, could defeat the divided right.

The bullets that terrified a nation

Each time I watch the Zapruder film, the horror does not diminish. It grows. Oswald’s bullets did not just kill a man: they terrified a nation. Whether or not it was the cue for – as the truthers claim – “a military industrial coup d’etat”, the country was never the same again.

When in Dallas, you should lay your beliefs about the events of 1963 on the table. I believe Oswald acted alone. It is possible he was acting with the knowledge of intelligence handlers somewhere – in Moscow, Havana or Washington – or thought he was. The general atmosphere of threatened violence from the right could have tipped him over; or maybe he did not need tipping over. Many of the inconsistencies in evidence look like they were created by incompetent or corrupt police and intelligence chiefs at the time, desperate to construct their own version of the story.

The nagging doubt remains whether Oswald could have fired his bolt action rifle and reloaded it three times, as Kennedy’s car drove down that fateful slope. But many of the police and soldiers who tried to replicate that feat did so.

I would like to think Oswald’s action was both brutal and pointless. But it was not pointless. If it was designed to immortalise Oswald himself, and it did that. If it was designed to sow fear and panic, it did that. If it was designed to remove a president who’d been ambivalent about the use of raw force in diplomacy, it did that too.

You tell yourself that violence solves nothing – that justice will out; that history will happen according to big tectonic changes.

But the archetypal little-guy, with his comb-over hair and perpetual air of grievance knew better. That’s what’s freaking me out in Dealey Plaza.