In the mid-1980s, at a party in an Amsterdam canal house, a man who claimed to have been a session musician on a few Beatles albums handed over a stack of grimy typewritten pages and said, "This will change your view of the world." world."
The widely photocopied document was titled 'The Key to the Gem File' and is said to explain who shot - who Real shot - President John F Kennedy in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963.
Sixty years later, this question continues to be asked and answered. At Dealey Plaza, the city park in downtown Dallas where the fatal bullets were fired, a white-haired peddler of murder-related literature assures me that the shooter was "Black Dog Man."
He pushes a magazine at me - 'JFK: The case for Conspiracy' - and within a minute he co-opts the murder into garbled fairy tales about 'the New World Order', wind turbines and microchips embedded in our brains.
"They call it Big Brother," he concludes affably, offering me a discount on the magazine.
The shooting of the president, almost a lifetime ago, is reinventing itself in the post-truth world of Trump-era America. The myriad conspiracies spawned by the event were the original fake news (my 'Gemstone File' pointed the finger at mafia hitmen hired by Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis) and in 2023 they find new currents to swim in.
Many people still feel that there was so much smoke that a conspiracy remains likely. But the Warren Commission's official 1964 finding concluded that deluded maverick Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in shooting Kennedy (from the Texas School Book Depository building on the northeast corner of Dealey Plaza) and that the resulting assassination by Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner with ties to the mafia, was a similarly random act.
This storyline, in which the American Dream turns into a nightmare in the autumn sun in a handful of seconds, is already drama enough. And what is special for visitors to Dallas is that the stage on which it took place is intact. When you compare "then" and "now" photos of Dealey Plaza, the only obvious difference is that in 1963, a giant billboard advertising Hertz Rent A Car stood crooked on the roof of the book warehouse.
The story continues
It's long gone. But on the Plaza itself, the rolling lawns, reflecting pools and curving colonnades - completed in 1940 as an elegant 'front porch' to the city - remain unchanged. However, they have acquired an eerie notoriety through specific associations with the ballistic chaos that unfolded.
For here is the 'grassy knoll', where a second or third shooter may or may not have been stationed, the 'picket fence' (also) and the concrete plinth on which seamstress Abraham Zapruder precariously balanced to capture the presidential motorcade on his 8mm camera to film. camera, creating the most-watched 26-second motion picture in American history.
Throughout these quasi-mythical locations on the warm October day I visit, swarm the conspirators touting their magazines and self-published books and the endlessly self-renewing audiences they cater to: foreign tourists addicted to the evil glamor of it all and Americans who are looking for their own history.
"It's surreal to see it with my own eyes," said Scott Eckert of Philadelphia. For his wife Debbie, the Plaza is smaller than she imagined on TV images. Both seem equally overwhelmed to finally be here.
We all cast our eyes between two points: the sixth-floor corner window of the former book store from which Oswald is said to have fired the shots, and the yellow cross in the center lane of the highway that marks the spot where Kennedy at 12:30 p.m. received the letter. the fatal bullet to the head as he sat in the back of the open-topped limousine.
The repository is home to an excellent museum, the Sixth Floor Museum on Dealey Plaza, dedicated to the assassination. But like the building itself, it stands at a distance from the conspiracy circus below. The museum's CEO, British-born Nicola Longford, admits they have to walk "a very fine line" and by presenting the story with scrupulous objectivity, the museum is antagonizing some conspiracy theorists, who dismiss it as a sanitized look at the murder.
It covers the toxic political atmosphere the young Democratic president found himself thrust into - his support for civil rights and perceived softness toward "communists" made Kennedy a hate figure for many in conservative-leaning Dallas - and acknowledges that "the questions 'Why?' or 'For or with whom?' remain unanswered". But ultimately, says Longford, "the power of the place is really what people come to see and feel."
Aside from the exhibition displays, the building's sixth floor is still the wood-and-brick warehouse space it was in 1963. Museum visitors (including this one) fall silent when they reach the corner window, sealed with glass to thwart souvenir hunters who cut off pieces of the window. frame. The barricade that Oswald made from boxes of books has been accurately recreated from evidence photographs.
The line of sight (from the adjacent window) of the yellow cross painted on the road below is unobstructed, the unimaginable outcome suddenly plausible. The report that broke the news to the world at 12:36 p.m., by ABC Radio host Don Gardiner, plays on an endless loop: "Here's a special bulletin from Dallas, Texas. Three shots were fired today at President Kennedy's motorcade in downtown Dallas, Texas.
Other key sites in the city remain in place, opening more shutters to its tangible history. After hanging out in Dealey Plaza, local guide Scott Beeman takes me to a cream-colored wooden house (currently vacant) at 214 W Neely St in the Oak Cliff neighborhood, where Oswald and his Russian wife Marina lived in the top-floor duplex in the Oak Cliff neighborhood. spring of 1963.
It was at this address that Oswald purchased by mail order (for $21.45) the Italian bolt action rifle found in the storeroom. Beeman shows me around to the backyard and points out the wooden fence and outdoor stairs that form the backdrop to a familiar image of Oswald that he swipes up on his phone.
"When he gets the gun, he is so excited that he dresses up and has Marina take this famous photo," says Beeman.
A few blocks away, at 1026 N Beckley Ave, is the former rooming house where Oswald rented a small room under the name OH Lee at the time of the assassination. The current owner is the granddaughter of the woman who ran it at the time, and has used original furnishings (including Oswald's cradle-like bedstead) to recreate the atmosphere of stale air and unasked questions in which Oswald drifted toward his fate.
Half an hour after the fatal shooting at Dealey Plaza, Oswald entered the rooming house to retrieve the .38 pistol with which he would kill police officer J.D. Tippit a few minutes later. He was then arrested at the Texas Theater movie theater on Jefferson Blvd and less than 48 hours later was himself fatally shot by Jack Ruby in the basement of the Dallas Police Station on Main Street. (Irony of ironies: the current notice posted on the basement entrance states that "Guns are prohibited under the Texas Penal Code.")
That's the story. But as I follow along, I find myself wanting to rewind to 12:29 on that Friday in 1963 - when presidents were impossibly young and hope was still on the table. Back at Dealey Plaza, a Boston woman talks about how sad it all is, "while these terrible things are still happening." And it dawns on me what we are all doing here. We await the redemption of another ending.
On the JFK trail in Dallas
The museum on the sixth floor
The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza is open Wednesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., $18. There is a special exhibit, "Two Days In Texas," celebrating the 60th anniversary.
Best DFW Tours offers 3-hour guided vehicle tours of JFK sites with rooming house access on N Beckley Avenue: from $400 (self-guided tours via phone connection: $24.99).
The Ruth Paine House
Oswald's wife lived at the Ruth Paine House in suburban Irving, where he kept the rifle and where he spent the night before the murder. Now a museum, it has been carefully recreated as it was in 1963. Tues-Sat, $12, by appointment only (email [email protected]).
Juanita Craft House
For a broader view, visit the excellent Juanita Craft House, dedicated to a luminary of the Dallas civil rights movement. Miss Craft was invited to the luncheon at the Trade Mart where the President was to address after the motorcade. The effect of his murder on the black community was devastating. Open by appointment. Also take time to visit the vibrant Deep Ellum neighborhood, where you can admire great nightlife and murals.
How do you get there?
America the way you want it; 020 8742 8299) offers a 13-night Texas Lone Star fly-drive from £1,890 per person, including return flights on American Airlines, car hire and accommodation in Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, Corpus Christi, Houston and Fort Worth. For more information about the city, see visitdallas.com.
Nigel Richardson is the author of 'The Accidental Detectorist: Uncovering an Underground Obsession', available in paperback from Telegraph books.
