Dead Presidents

HENRY ROEDIGER is a psychology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, and he’s been researching how—and sometimes if—we remember presidents. He says our brains remember the presidents “like we would recall a list that somebody gave us. . . . Usually you can remember the presidents who were during your lifetime, and you get a few before that, and then of course most people can also get the early presidents. They can get Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson. But after that, except for Lincoln, it kind of falls off.”

Roediger has been running these memory tests for forty years—so long, he says, that “we can actually plot for people, from Truman on, how quickly they’re being forgotten. For most presidents, they’ll live in modern memory for about 50 or 100 years, and then they’ll drop down to roughly the baseline of about 20 to 25 percent of people can remember them, if you give them five minutes.” A half century from now, once-towering figures like Harry Truman or Dwight D. Eisenhower may be remembered as poorly as Rutherford B. Hayes or Zachary Taylor are today.

The only exceptions, he says, come “if there’s something really distinctive” in an administration—like presiding over a war, for example, or getting a major piece of legislation passed. Or, possibly, a president’s jarring, tragic assassination, followed by the biggest funeral in national history and an ongoing effort to assure that president’s place in history.

John F. Kennedy’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery, just outside Washington, has an eternal flame; it’s probably the most recognized grave marker of any president. Unlike the other presidential graves, which place their subjects in the past, Kennedy’s eternal flame aims for the future. It consciously recalls something JFK once said: “A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.”

It’s moving. It’s beautiful. It’s poignant. It is not, however, eternal: the flame at the grave today is not the one Jacqueline Kennedy lit in 1963. The original structure, essentially a custom-built wire basket welded to a tiki torch, was put together the day before the president’s funeral by Arlington superintendent John C. Metzler and Lieutenant Colonel Bernard G. Carroll, the post engineer at nearby Fort Myer. “I advised them that such a construction and installation was beyond my capabilities,” Metzler said later. “Their answer was, ‘Yes, we know but somehow get an eternal flame.’” The contraption had to be hidden under pine boughs, which had been doused twice with water so that the first lady wouldn’t catch on fire as she lit the gas-powered torch.

19. Despite its name, John F. Kennedy’s “eternal flame” at Arlington National Cemetery has been replaced several times, most recently in 2013.

Bill Morris, who served as one of the guards at the tomb, told CBS Sunday Morning that “if you were assigned at the eternal flame you had to have a lighter in your pocket. Every time the wind blew, it went out.” One visitor tried to sprinkle holy water on the tomb but ended up dousing the flame; the guard reassured the visitor as he relit the torch, saying, “I won’t tell if you won’t tell.”

The permanent torch, installed in 1967, included an electric spark mechanism that would automatically relight the flame in case of wind or holy-water-wielding cemetery-goers. But even the permanent flame wasn’t permanent: the system reached the end of its expected life-span in 2013, and crews had to rig up another temporary eternal flame while they conducted repairs. Eternity is a hard thing to come by, even for a president.

Not that the Kennedys haven’t given eternity a heck of a try. No one tried harder than Jacqueline Kennedy, who worried her husband’s relatively short term would be forgotten. “He didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights,” she said to her mother after learning about the background of Lee Harvey Oswald, his accused assassin. “It had to be some silly little Communist. It robs his death of any meaning.”

Jacqueline Kennedy knew well the power of a good symbol. After all, she’d led a huge restoration of the White House, which she called “the setting in which the presidency is presented to the world.” Her plan was to connect her husband’s presidency not to its earthly accomplishments but to timeless, universal themes and values. She’d seen an eternal flame at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and took pride in how visible JFK’s was. “Whenever you drive across the bridge from Washington into Virginia,” she said, “you see the Lee mansion on the side of the hill in the distance. . . . Now, at night you can see his flame beneath the mansion for miles away.”

She chose the burial site at Arlington, which was a pretty important piece of the effort to make Kennedy eternal. The president had expected to be buried back in Massachusetts—“Guess I’ll have to go back to Boston,” he’d told an aide of his funeral plans—and there was a family plot waiting for him at Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline.^* As lovely a spot as it was, though, Holyhood wasn’t going to make Jack Kennedy’s name live on for centuries. The cemetery where Americans bury their most honored dead—that’s the kind of place where a president can be remembered.

The Kennedy grave is also in a direct line with the National Mall. Visitors who face east on the hilltop will see the Lincoln Memorial, at the other end of the Memorial Bridge, with the Washington Monument and the US Capitol in the distance. And in the bottom range of their vision, almost like a caption, are some of Kennedy’s most stirring quotes, like the one from his inaugural address: “The energy, the faith, the devotion, which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it, and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.”

Jacqueline Kennedy wanted to model JFK’s funeral on the one put together for Abraham Lincoln in 1865—an incredibly audacious move, really. Imagine, for example, that Richard Nixon had won the 1960 election and had then been assassinated three years later; a Lincoln-scale funeral would have come off as massively showy and over the top. Even Sargent Shriver, who had been doing most of the Kennedy funeral legwork, warned the first lady that “some people might think [the funeral plan was] a little ostentatious.” But she pulled it off. The most memorable moments from the funeral service are the ones Jackie chose: the long, grim procession of world leaders, led by a widow in a black veil, with nothing but the sound of drums accompanying them; fifty fighter planes, one for each state, roaring overhead in the “missing man” formation, and a flyover by Special Air Mission 26000, the plane the president had known as Air Force One, which dipped its wings in tribute as it flew over; Mrs. Kennedy whispering to three-year-old John F. Kennedy Jr., “John, you can salute Daddy now and say good-bye to him,” and the boy giving a perfect salute.

The pageant was so big, and so well executed, that even the pieces that didn’t go as planned seemed to fit. Viewers of the funeral procession took notice of the riderless horse, Black Jack, who’d been spooked by a loud noise just before the cortege began. His agitated dancing seemed to mirror the nation’s grief. Army Sergeant Keith Clark cracked the sixth note of “Taps” on his bugle during the services at Arlington; this was because his lips had gone numb from standing in the cold for hours, but to the 175 million Americans watching on television, it sounded like his “voice” was breaking with emotion.

By the time she lit the eternal flame at Arlington, Jacqueline Kennedy and her funeral planners had made this enormous pageant look not only good but obvious, as if anything else would have been too little. “Jacqueline Kennedy,” wrote the London Evening Standard, “has given the American people from this day on one thing they have always lacked—majesty.”

The reporter was speaking figuratively, but Mrs. Kennedy had something like majesty on her mind. One week to the day after her husband died, she called Theodore White, who had covered the Kennedy campaign in his best seller The Making of the President 1960 and covered the majestic funeral for Life magazine. White said Mrs. Kennedy brought him to Hyannis Port because “there was something that she wanted Life magazine to say to the country, and I must do it.” When he arrived, the thing the former First Lady wanted said was that she was “worried Jack would be forgotten by history.” Then she brought up a popular song lyric that has characterized Kennedy ever since.

“At night, before we’d go to sleep,” she told White, “Jack liked to play some records; and the song he loved most came at the very end of this record. The lines he loved to hear were: Don’t let it be forgot / that once there was a spot / for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.”

Whether it was real or not is hard to say. A number of top Kennedy administration officials derided the comparison, and Kennedy’s private secretary claimed later that the president “never listened to ‘Camelot’ in his whole life.” Even Jacqueline Kennedy told White that “when Jack quoted something, it was usually classical.” Real or not, the metaphor doesn’t quite gel, either. “Don’t let it be forgot,” wrote Richard Woodward for the Daily Beast in 2013, “that Camelot, despite what Jackie wanted us to think, was a story about infidelity by beautiful people who brought down a government. It does not end happily.” The Life editors thought the Camelot talk was too sentimental and tried to cut it down in Theodore White’s piece, but the first lady stood her ground. White ended up mentioning Camelot in his thousand-word essay three times.

Once again, Jacqueline Kennedy’s instincts for symbols were right. It may have been contrived, but Camelot gave the country a hook upon which to hang its image of Kennedy: “a magic moment in American history,” White said years later, characterizing Mrs. Kennedy’s concept, “in which gallant men danced with beautiful women, when great deeds were done, when artists, writers and poets met at the White House, and the barbarians beyond the walls held back.” News stories still talk of the Kennedy years as Camelot, a term no one used to describe them when Kennedy was alive.

Jack Kennedy’s father had a saying: “Things don’t happen, they are made to happen.” That’s what Jacqueline Kennedy did with symbols like the eternal flame and Camelot. Her genius wasn’t just that she placed these symbols in our cultural memory. She could also make those symbols look like they were there all along.

PRESIDENT KENNEDY had the same talent, especially in dealing with the press. After the funeral, Newsweek wrote that “no President had ever been so accessible to the press; no President ever so anxious for history to be recorded in the making; he even let TV cameras peek over his shoulder in moments of national crisis.” But that image, too, was constructed: the family had been media-savvy going back to the days when patriarch Joseph Kennedy would arrange for himself and his kids to appear in newsreels, just to put their names and faces before the public. President Kennedy brought reporters home with him and let them linger while he “relaxed”; the informal conversations sounded like candor, but Kennedy was consciously choosing what to share with the press and what to withhold. “I don’t tell anything to the press, on any basis, that I don’t expect to see in print,” he said. “When you’re president, you are president twenty-four hours a day.”

Kennedy practiced one-liners and jokes ahead of each press conference so they’d sound more spontaneous, and his press people would suggest questions for reporters to ask. Again, these techniques aren’t unique to Kennedy, but because he sounded unrehearsed and off-the-cuff, the media gave more coverage to his news conferences than to any president’s to that point—which is just what the president wanted. “We were props in a show,” one reporter complained later. “We should have joined Actors Equity.”

If Kennedy’s was, as TV critic Tom Shales suggested, “an Administration that was also a TV series,” then it was at least a good one, and Kennedy was a success as one of TV’s leading men. Unfortunately, his assassination became his highest-rated episode. “It’s the moment where we became a television nation,” says Patty Rhule, senior manager of exhibit development at the Newseum, which looked at media coverage of the assassination in an exhibit called “Three Shots Were Fired.” During the four days between Dallas and Arlington, Rhule says, “the press really did what it’s supposed to do, informing and calming a nation.”

The assassination became an especially important part of the creation story of broadcast news. “Not only did television surpass print for primacy as a news source for the first time,” Entertainment Weekly said years later of the coverage, “it created a focal point for the public’s grief.” A 1964 study found that within an hour of the shooting, 68 percent of Americans knew about it, and over 90 percent knew by the end of hour two. Most had heard about it on television or radio, and about 175 million of them followed the four days of special network coverage that ensued.^† In the Newseum exhibit, Rhule and her team put together a video wall of reports from the frenetic moments right after the shooting. “No one goes past that,” Rhule says, “without watching that whole nine-minute roll,” and I did see several middle-aged visitors stop at the screen, clearly reliving the experience of 1963 as they watched. But were they remembering what they’d actually seen at the time of the assassination, or were they remembering how we had come to remember that news coverage as a culture?

Time has shaped the way we remember how TV covered the Kennedy assassination—sometimes accurately, sometimes not. The most famous news clip from the coverage shows Walter Cronkite fighting back tears as he gave the CBS audience official word of Kennedy’s death. Yet in 1963, more viewers probably tuned in to NBC’s news coverage; their anchors, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, had been beating Cronkite and CBS for several years and didn’t lose the top spot until the end of the decade. We remember the Cronkite moment, though, because he went on to be the “most trusted man in America” as CBS anchor in the 1970s and early ’80s.

And while our culture fondly remembers the assassination coverage on TV, that coverage actually got off to a shaky start. No journalist in Dallas said he or she saw President Kennedy’s assassination firsthand, and none of them got the event on film. The only person who filmed the assassination as it happened was Abraham Zapruder—a Dallas dressmaker. At CBS in New York, Walter Cronkite had a bulletin in hand, but no easy way to get the momentous news on the air. “Our nearest camera was down in the studio in the Grand Central Building and they had to get the camera up to the newsroom,” he said later. “In those days, it took twenty minutes for the camera to warm up to be ready to go on the air. So besides lugging the camera up to the newsroom, then you had to turn it on, and then you had to wait twenty minutes for this thing to be ready to go. . . . So instead, we went into the radio booth, a small booth that had radio capability, to get on the radio network. We interrupted the program in progress on the television network, which was As the World Turns, for a bulletin, which I ad-libbed.” From that point forward, Cronkite said, there was always a camera in the CBS newsroom, and it was always on.

The troubles continued: a TV reporter from Dallas managed to film police apprehending Lee Harvey Oswald in the Texas Theatre, but the camera had been set up incorrectly, causing the footage to come out overexposed and unusable. Days later, a live CBS interview ran so long that the network missed the police transfer during which Jack Ruby shot Oswald. One of the correspondents got the suspect/victim’s name wrong, telling viewers, “Lee Harold Oswald has been shot!”

You wouldn’t expect shaky coverage like this to get its own museum exhibit, or stick in people’s minds for decades. But there are plenty of reasons it has. Barbie Zelizer teaches and studies journalism and culture at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. She told PBS that even shaky coverage, from a medium “seen as the fluff journalists,” was something a person or a family could turn to during an enormously important news moment. “What you got,” Zelizer said, “was an ongoing attentiveness to the event that print could not provide. We got ongoing continuous coverage of the story.”

The coverage got better as the four days went on. CBS’s problems aside, NBC did broadcast Oswald’s shooting live, and all the networks covered the president’s visually striking funeral and burial. When you focus just on the immediate aftermath of the shooting, the media coverage is uneven, but when it’s presented as “four days of special coverage,” it seems much stronger.

And, Zelizer says, TV news has had a vested interest in keeping alive the story of great assassination coverage, especially given that many of those who had covered the tragedy became the titans of broadcast media for the coming generation. There was Cronkite, of course, but Zelizer says the Exhibit A in this story is Dan Rather, the man who succeeded Cronkite in the CBS anchor chair. “His career was built on the fact that he was in Dallas on that day,” she says. “Every CBS special that would retell the Kennedy assassination story on anniversary dates would show Rather and showcase his understanding of what had happened.” He was far from the only one. Peter Jennings, who anchored ABC News in the 1980s and ’90s, defied his editors in Canada and took a plane to Dallas to cover the shooting. Robert MacNeil, who would coanchor PBS’s nightly news with Jim Lehrer, was the NBC News White House correspondent. Looking for a phone after the shots, he ran into, of all places, the Texas School Book Depository, and may have run into Lee Harvey Oswald as he fled the building. “As I ran up the steps and through the door, a young man in shirtsleeves was coming out,” MacNeil said. “In great agitation I asked him where there was a phone. He pointed inside.” Lehrer, too, was in Dallas, covering the president’s visit for the Times Herald, then covering the Dallas police as they brought Lee Harvey Oswald into a news conference. He happened to be standing near Jack Ruby, who would shoot Oswald days later.

CBS stalwart Bob Schieffer faced perhaps the weirdest situation of them all: he answered the phone at the Fort Worth Star newspaper to hear a woman ask him for a ride to Dallas. “Madam, this is not a taxi service, and besides, the president has been shot,” he said. “Yes, I know,” the woman said. “I think my son is the one they’ve arrested.” Schieffer not only drove Marguerite Oswald to Dallas, he stayed with her in the police station, using a wide-brimmed, detective-style hat he’d bought to disguise the fact that he wasn’t actually a police officer. He very nearly got to interview Lee Harvey Oswald before police figured out who he was and sent him away.

“This is the most ambitious exhibit we’ve ever done here,” Patty Rhule says of the Newseum installation, and I can see why: they had to document not only what the news media covered in 1963 but also how we’ve come to remember that coverage. As for the famous CBS clip? “We had to have the big Walter Cronkite moment,” Rhule says, because “whether you saw it or not, you feel like you saw it.”

THAT CRONKITE clip got a lot of play in the fall of 2013, during the enormous—and profitable—buildup to the fiftieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. Publishers put out book after book to coincide with the half-century mark; TV news put out the usual documentaries looking back, and the National Geographic Channel got its highest ratings ever with a miniseries adapting Bill O’Reilly’s book Killing Kennedy, with Rob Lowe as JFK.

Seemingly every writer, reporter, photographer, and curiosity seeker in the universe, me included, headed to Dallas to mark the occasion. Dallas has tried hard to move forward in the last fifty years; the Dallas Convention and Visitors Bureau slogan, “Big Things Happen Here,” points out that Dallas–Fort Worth International Airport is the third busiest in the world, and that the area is home to eighteen Fortune 500 companies. Still, one of the city’s most popular tourist attractions is the Sixth Floor Museum, formerly the Texas School Book Depository. And every November 22 the media and the world take a moment to remember that the biggest thing that happened here had nothing to do with international flights or big business.

It’s mostly on the anniversaries that Dallas seems to get uneasy about its status as an assassination site; the rest of the time, you can find an undercurrent of irreverence even about Dealey Plaza. My friend RaeAnna, for example, is a member of a JFK-themed Roller Derby league; the Assassination City Roller Derby has teams with names like Ruby’s Revenge, which has as its team logo a showgirl from one of Jack Ruby’s nightclubs, riding atop a freshly fired pistol. The league has grown to over a hundred competitors since launching in 2005, and it counts real estate firms, car care centers, and radio stations among its sponsors. As the anniversary drew closer, though, RaeAnna said Assassination City Roller Derby chose not to hold any special public events. “People,” she said, “are still touchy about the assassination. People try not to talk about it.”

“Don’t talk about it and it will pass” could have been Dallas’s unofficial strategy for dealing with the first forty-nine anniversaries. Aside from an event in 1993 to recognize Dealey Plaza’s newly acquired status as a National Historic Landmark District, the city left the site of Kennedy’s murder each November 22 to the public—meaning mostly assassination buffs, tourists, and reporters, as well as those trying to sell things to them. But 2013 was going to be different. After fifty years of this painful dance, Dallas decided to make a deal: we’ll tolerate your obsession with the Kennedy assassination, as long as you check out our arts district while you’re in town.

The event known as The 50th would be Dallas’s first full city-sanctioned commemoration ceremony of John F. Kennedy and his assassination. Mayor Mike Rawlings had repeatedly stressed this would be a “serious, respectful, understated” affair, and I’d be hard-pressed to prove it wasn’t serious and respectful—they had bagpipers and the historian David McCullough—but the word “understated” raised some eyebrows in town. “We want it to be very classy,” Rawlings went on to say, but people were concerned “understated” actually meant the city would mark the assassination without mentioning it. And, technically, the name of the event—“The 50th”—didn’t mention the assassination. It sounded like a Mad Lib: The 50th what?

There was nothing understated about getting into The 50th: the general public was limited to five thousand tickets, distributed to those who went through a lengthy request process. Getting press credentials was even more complicated: I’ve covered the actual, live, sitting president, and getting in to see him was a lot less cumbersome than getting into this. Dallas police had cordoned off Dealey Plaza and the surrounding area with blocks and blocks of metal security fencing, patrolled by uniformed officers. Even the official John F. Kennedy Memorial was off-limits to the general public during The 50th; the Dallas City Council had earmarked more than $150,000 for security trailers with surveillance cameras, just for this one day.

It wasn’t much different inside the plaza; reporters could only talk with ticketholders over the fence, and those who stopped in the wrong spot might be shooed along by event staff. “We have to keep the chute clear,” one said, over and over. A few of us had to clear out of the grassy knoll because, as we were told, “NBC News has exclusive”—the guy emphasized the word the way they do on TV—“access to this area.”

The press tent was just behind the grassy knoll’s picket fence, a spot where those who believe there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy think a second shooter may have done his grisly work. The fence was covered in messages. THE DRIVER DID IT! said someone who signed her name as “Libertarian Anne.” Another pointed the finger at LBJ. Others had left more general messages, like YOLO JFK or RIP, while one person wrote two angry messages in blue marker: FUCK OSWALD and FUCK JACK RUBY.

Inside the press tent I joined several reporters who were loading up on coffee and cinnamon rolls. I overheard one of them mention that “the X is gone”—for years tourists had been ducking into traffic to get their picture taken next to one of two big white X’s on the approximate locations where Kennedy had been shot. But two days before The 50th, the city repaved just the sections of Elm Street that had been marked—“to level out the streets,” according to the official explanation. Rodger Jones of the Dallas Morning News wasn’t so sure; he’d bet money that the city would remove the “gruesome little tourist magnets” ahead of November 22. “The city’s big ceremony next week is trying to focus on Kennedy’s life, not on the patches of ground where bullets slammed into his body,” he wrote. “The X’s were bad ‘optics’ for what the city wants to project.”

Much like the Kennedys, and much like the news media that covered them, Dallas has tried to project a narrative about itself, one best summed up by University of Texas English professor Don Graham as the City That Worked—a place full of big ideas and bigger plans. “Everybody in Dallas in that area at that time was optimistic about getting jobs and getting education,” Graham said. “Dallas was interested in protecting the business climate.” The city had started to diversify beyond oil and land sales; Texas Instruments had made the city a player in the early tech sector, and its defense industry was growing as well. You could imagine newsreels with names like “Dallas: A Future as Big as Texas!” and scores of smiling Dallas residents on the go toward progress and initiative and civic pride and prosperity.

A journalist in the 1940s said of the city, “Dallas doesn’t owe a damn thing to accident, nature or inevitability. It is what it is . . . because the men of Dallas damn well planned it that way.” And the extremely reputation-conscious city leaders didn’t like it when a news story didn’t reflect well on the Big D—like news footage of furious protesters holding up signs that said things like “LBJ Sold Out to Yankee Socialists.” That sign became famous in the 1960 campaign, when Dallas congressman Bruce Alger and his supporters accosted Kennedy’s vice presidential nominee, Lyndon Johnson, and his wife at the Adolphus Hotel. For a full half hour they screamed, shouted, and spat not only at the candidate but at his wife (a big no-no in the gallant South).

There were others besides Alger. H. L. Hunt, the original eccentric Texas oil baron, put out pamphlets and radio programs excoriating Kennedy for his “soft” policies toward Communists; the ultraconservative John Birch Society, which designated Dallas its regional headquarters, did the same. There was Dallas Morning News publisher Ted Dealey, who famously told the president to his face that in a time where the United States needed “a man on horseback,” Kennedy was instead riding his daughter Caroline’s tricycle in halfhearted “charges” against the Reds.^‡ Dealey’s preferred “man on horseback” was former army general Edwin Walker, who accused the administration of tossing him out of the military because they were in league with Moscow and he was standing in the way of a Communist takeover.

Walker supporters heckled UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson during a speech at Dallas’s Memorial Auditorium Theater; one famously smacked Stevenson over the head with a sign. “Are these human beings or animals?” Stevenson asked, and he told the president to reconsider his trip to Dallas. He wasn’t the only one: US senators and prominent Dallas leaders thought the atmosphere in town might be too hot to control, and citizens wrote to the White House to dissuade the president from visiting their city. “No number of policeman, plainclothes men nor militia can control the ‘air,’” Dallas resident Nelle M. Doyle wrote to White House press secretary Pierre Salinger on October 28, 1963, less than a month before Kennedy’s visit. “It is a dreadful thought, but all remember the fate of President McKinley.”

The Stevenson incident was the final straw for official Dallas. If strident voices like these convinced others this was a city where they could do business, the image of Dallas as the City That Worked would stop working. Mayor Earle Cabell, who had welcomed General Walker on his arrival, now denounced “so-called patriots” as a “cancer on the body politic”; he would run, and win, against Bruce Alger for Congress in the next election. And a hundred prominent Dallas leaders joined the mayor in sending Adlai Stevenson an official and very public apology, pointing out that “a small group of extremists” were responsible for his troubles. The rest of the city, they wrote, was “outraged and abjectly ashamed of the disgraceful discourtesies you suffered.”

It’s hard to say how much of this sinister reputation would have stuck to Dallas without the assassination. It’s fair to question why city leaders didn’t stand up to these voices earlier, but the news coverage had probably made these figures look bigger than they probably were. Take Bruce Alger; his protesters at the Adolphus Hotel won a lot of attention, but their attacks on the Johnsons backfired. Lyndon Johnson chose to walk directly through Alger’s foaming mass of protesters, knowing full well the cameras would make him look sympathetic and make Alger and his people look nuts, just weeks before Election Day 1960. The Kennedy-Johnson ticket narrowly won Texas, and the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon, blamed Alger, whom he called “that asshole congressman from Dallas,” for costing him the state. General Edwin Walker made a vaunted run for governor, but the campaign was a flop (when you’re running in Texas, don’t hold your campaign kickoff in Chicago); he finished sixth out of six candidates in the primary.

Not to minimize Dallas’s problems: racial integration, for example, started later here than in other cities, and it took longer to achieve. The Big D had a high murder rate and an ongoing problem with organized crime. But none of this was unique to any city in 1963—it was the era of George Wallace telling Alabama that he stood for “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” and the era of sit-ins at Birmingham lunch counters and riots in Cambridge, Maryland. Civil rights activist Medgar Evers was murdered in the summer of 1963. The March on Washington is known today for Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, but at the time it was better known as a protest for jobs and civil rights. It was the year of the brazen bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham that killed four African American girls at Sunday school.

Don Graham of the University of Texas said most Americans in 1963 wouldn’t have thought of Dallas as an outlier. “If you want to pick a city where Kennedy might have been assassinated,” he says, “it would be Miami—because of all the anti-Castro [sentiment]. Dallas went all out to try to make [Kennedy’s] visit successful. The last thing they wanted was something like this to happen.”

But it did happen, and that sealed Dallas’s fate. Of course Kennedy had been murdered in Dallas, people across the country said after the shooting; look at what they’d done to Lyndon Johnson and Adlai Stevenson. The City That Worked had become the City of Hate, a place so lawless and unhinged it wasn’t just the site of the assassination but the accomplice. “The world decided that Kennedy had died in enemy territory,” reflected the journalist and author Lawrence Wright, who grew up in Dallas. “No matter who had killed him, we had willed him dead.” The New York Times made note in its Kennedy assassination coverage that in 1865 most southern newspapers had expressed sorrow at the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, but the Dallas Herald had triumphantly declared the murder holy: “God Almighty ordered this event or it could never have taken place.” Even Kennedy got in on the act from the grave; Jacqueline Kennedy recalled her husband’s response to a foaming-at-the-mouth political ad in one of the Dallas papers: “We’re heading into nut country today.”

It took its toll. In the years after the assassination, Dallas saw its already high murder rate go up. The suicide rate spiked, too, and more people died of heart disease—all at a time when those trends were not climbing anywhere else. Dallas residents told stories for years about traveling and being told by fellow Americans that “you all killed our president,” or being refused cab service simply for mentioning where they lived.

At first the city tried to defend itself. “There are maniacs all over the world,” Mayor Cabell said. “It could have happened in Podunk as well as in Dallas.” Apologists for Dallas stressed that Lee Harvey Oswald was no John Bircher; he was a Marxist who had lived in the Soviet Union and confessed to his (Russian-born) wife that he once tried to kill General Edwin Walker. They pointed to the enormous crowds, two hundred thousand strong, and noted that the last words Kennedy ever heard were from Texas’s first lady, Nellie Connally, who said, “Mr. President, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you.” “I think it is significant that the president received a warm and genuine reception by thousands of its residents before he was shot by a single emotionally disturbed man,” a minister told the New York Times. “Dallas cannot be explained in a few words. It is a lot of things.”

People tried a lot of things to get Dallas out of the shadow of Dealey Plaza. In 1970 the magician Gene De Jean drove up from Houston, claiming that a “malignant black coven” had put Dallas under a curse and that it couldn’t move forward until the curse was lifted. The city got some positive vibes from the success of the Dallas Cowboys, known as “America’s Team,” and from the TV show Dallas, featuring Larry Hagman as lovably wicked oil tycoon J. R. Ewing, an anti-hero modeled in part on H. R. Hunt. More recently the city tried emphasizing Dealey Plaza as a historical site well beyond its Kennedy ties, with one official describing the plaza as “a major public green space on the west side of downtown.” (Reporter Eric Nicholson of the Dallas Observer summed up the message behind this effort as “One Unfortunate Afternoon Shouldn’t Overshadow Dealey Plaza’s Decades of Not Murdering Presidents.”) Time, too, softened the public attitude toward Dallas. But a nickname like the City of Hate, even if unfairly earned, is hard to shake.

The 50th was about shaking the last lingering traces of that foul reputation and reintroducing Dallas to people who thought only of the violence of November 22. If nothing else, they got to see how cold it can get in Texas: temperatures hovered around the freezing point, freezing rain turned to light snow and then back to freezing rain, and the organizers called off the symphony orchestra performance and the “missing man” flyover. Reporters got into a routine of interviewing one or two people in the crowd and then scurrying back to the press tent to stand near space heaters. I shivered on the lawn as the outdoor video screen showed clips of Kennedy’s inaugural address—I realized I’d basically turned into William Henry Harrison and noted sadly to myself that if I, too, were to expire thirty days after the event I would miss Christmas.

Fortunately the event got under way before I succumbed to the elements. There was a video welcome from Ruth Altshuler, a longtime Dallas civic leader and philanthropist and chair of the planning committee for The 50th. In 1963 she was at the Trade Mart, waiting to hear President Kennedy speak at a lunch event of the Dallas Citizens Council; several days later she served as the only female member of the grand jury that indicted Jack Ruby for murder. She said in a video message that she got involved in the event because “I was so tired of people running Dallas down . . . and I wanted people to see how exciting Dallas is.” The Big D, she said, is the “volunteer center of the world.” And “the arts district is fantastic.”

Other speakers echoed these ideas. In the invocation, Bishop Kevin Farrell talked about how the city “suffered and was implicated . . . a place that was disgraced, scarred and ruthlessly judged.” The closing prayer by the Rev. Zan Holmes Jr. urged the city to focus not on “where we have been and what we have done, but where we’re going.”

Mayor Rawlings gave the keynote speech, and even though he’d talked about The 50th being an understated event, he admitted that he’d been working on the speech for almost a year. “It’s something I’ve had many sleepless nights about,” he told the Dallas Morning News. “Public recognition of history is an important way for people . . . to see themselves. They see themselves through that historic moment.” How did Dallas see itself? What was it the city of now?

The mayor dropped a few clues when he talked about what he’d been reading to prepare for the speech. One was Profiles in Courage, a choice obviously aimed to show that Dallas hadn’t hated Kennedy in 1963 and surely didn’t now. The other was more intriguing: a 1964 initiative known as “Goals for Dallas.” It was proposed (and funded) by Earle Cabell’s successor as mayor, J. Erik Jonsson, the cofounder of tech giant Texas Instruments and, in his seven years as mayor, the architect of post-assassination Dallas. It was a cosmic coincidence that Jonsson would be the one in this role, given that he was born on the day President McKinley was shot.

His work began almost immediately; as president of the Dallas Citizens Council, Jonsson had to tell the audience at the Trade Mart about the shooting, glumly saying, “I feel like the fellow on Pearl Harbor Day.” Jonsson attended Kennedy’s funeral in Washington because, as he said, “the city should be represented”; not long after he returned, the city council chose him to succeed Earle Cabell as mayor. And Jonsson put Dallas back to work, building the mammoth Dallas–Fort Worth Airport, pushing for a new city hall and a mass transit system, improving libraries and schools, and urging Dallas to “dream no small dreams.”

After paying tribute to Erik Jonsson as the man who “re-energized” Dallas, Rawlings quoted a Dallas rabbi, Levi Olan, who gave a famous radio address in the midst of the “City of Hate” talk. “The city is not guilty of the crime,” Rabbi Olan had said, but he also noted that “as the powerful light shone upon it, the city, it was learned, had been inhospitable to honorable debate.” Rabbi Olan, the mayor said, “captured the heartbreak and hurt the city felt; he stated plainly the defects and failings that were laid bare before the world. But most important, he called for Dallas to use this tragedy to seek a true transformation. Look around today, and I believe we have heeded that call. . . . Today, because of the hard work of many people, Dallas is a different city.”

That’s when I realized what was happening. Mayor Rawlings was proposing that Dallas, which had aspired to be the City That Worked, and had been vilified as the City of Hate, had become the City That Changed—a place that saw something it didn’t like in itself and did something to fix it. Rawlings even suggested the transformation showed Dallas had fulfilled Kennedy’s legacy: “As the people of Dallas did then,” he said, “each of us must meet our oncoming challenges head-on, with courage—honoring but not living in the past . . . and never flinching from the truth. We must meet the future with the same vigor, optimism, and unfailing sense of duty that our young president embodied.”

It was a tricky line to walk, because if Dallas changed after Kennedy’s death, then it would almost confirm what the critics had said about the city all along. It might have made Dallas look like a suspect who, after hours of interrogation, threw up its hands in exhaustion and said, we could have sworn we didn’t do it, but maybe we really did. But I think Rawlings was trying to recognize that Dallas was never going to be able to outrun November 22 or pretend it didn’t exist. “He and our city will forever be linked,” Rawlings said. “In tragedy, yes. But out of that tragedy an opportunity was granted to us: the chance to learn how to face the future when it is darkest and most uncertain.” Dallas had to acknowledge the hate before anyone would believe hate wasn’t what the city was about.

Of course, this is all built on the presumption that people actually still thought of Dallas as the city that killed John F. Kennedy, and Don Graham at the University of Texas wasn’t convinced of that. “They still think that there are people in America that think Dallas hasn’t changed,” he said. “They’re still reacting to it. If you find a place where nothing has changed since 1963, you’re in Cuba.”

And it also presumes that the Kennedy legacy, of which Dallas is now a part, is forever. It’s not going anywhere for the time being: millions of people continue to take in the Eternal Flame at Arlington, and I don’t expect visits are going to drop off at the Sixth Floor Museum anytime soon. The documentaries and books and theories are going to keep coming out. And the big white X’s, the ones the city removed ahead of the ceremony, were back in place on Elm Street even before I got home to New Hampshire. But there’s a little bit of evidence that the Kennedy era might be starting to recede, albeit very slowly. In 2013 Public Policy Polling asked Americans about conspiracies and found that people under thirty were about half as likely as older individuals to believe there was a larger conspiracy behind the assassination. It’s one poll, obviously, but if it’s a meaningful poll, Dealey Plaza may someday be as quiet on November 22 as Buffalo, New York, is each September on the anniversary of McKinley’s assassination.

Dealey Plaza did get back to its current normal as the official ceremony ended: as I left I saw a group of protesters shouting “No more lies!” on the street, and apparently they went on to confront some police, but the city’s tight lid on the proceedings held: nobody inside the plaza saw or heard them. As the plaza emptied out I walked over to a restaurant called Lee Harvey’s, a mile and a half from Elm Street and the grassy knoll and white X’s and debates over what kind of city Dallas was, or is. The TV next to the bar was replaying the CBS assassination coverage from 1963; by the time I got my grilled cheese on jalapeño bread and crispy onion rings, the woman behind the counter had turned the screen off and put the jukebox back on. “We’ve already listened to this once,” she said.

^* The Kennedys’ son Patrick, who had died shortly after birth in August 1963, had already been buried at Holyhood.

^† Only the wall-to-wall coverage of the September 11, 2001, attacks was longer.

^‡ Dealey Plaza, where Kennedy was shot, is named for Ted Dealey’s father, George.