In 1979 I passed through Texas on assignment for Look magazine to write about the twelve men who had walked on the moon. One of the twelve, Charlie Duke, was walking now on New Braunfels, a German settlement south of Austin, where he was intending to build shopping centers. Duke is an ingenuous man with wide brown eyes and a face you probably wouldn’t recognize. Recently, he said, he had been touched by God, not on the moon, as one of the other astronauts claimed, but on State Highway 46. I rode with him and his wife, Dottie, to an Episcopal church in Austin where Charlie was giving a talk about his religious experience and his voyage on Apollo 16.
It had been ten years since the first man, an American, set foot on the moon, a Cold War adventure that John Kennedy had proposed in my childhood. I was in the eighth grade when Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space and sent Americans into an identity crisis that could be resolved only by planting the Stars and Stripes in the lunar soil. The moon program cost $25 billion and had left me feeling alienated from one of history’s great achievements. Astronauts were heroes when Kennedy was alive, but they had come to be, in my mind, naive and faceless projections of the Chamber of Commerce and the military-industrial complex. On Christmas Eve, 1968, I had sat with my parents in Dallas watching Frank Borman read from Genesis as Apollo 8 circled the moon, and although I was moved by the words and awed by the setting, it had seemed bizarrely out of touch with the America of the sixties, the murdered leaders, the burning ghettos, the burgeoning war.
But now that the sixties were in the grave of memory and the seventies were passing away, it was easier to see the space program as a part of a separate history, that of the universal urge to explore and push on, which has always been the sport of great nations. In another life, if one wanted to surrender to such thoughts, Charlie Duke might have been a crewman on the ships of Magellan or Captain Cook.
“I’m gonna prob’ly cry tonight, okay?” he warned me.
He was asking me not to condemn him. It is the journalist’s power to make others appear large or small, intelligent or fatuous, worthy or contemptible. Also, as a class, reporters are famous agnostics and not likely to respond to religious displays. For years I had been repelled by the treacly sentiments of Christianity, which in my experience had an opposite face of intolerance and greed. I could choose to apply these sentiments to Charlie Duke, as I rode along taking notes in the backseat of his Mercedes-Benz, or else, what is more natural to journalism, I could forgive his religiousness and draw him up a bit larger than he really was.
I was speculating on the vagaries of the American quest for celebrity, which had made the name of Neil Armstrong immortal, while leaving Charlie Duke among the footnotes. The very idea of celebrity, that we would raise one above the others, especially one above equals, stood against what was really important about the American experiment, which was the wonderful accomplishments of ordinary men and women. Of the two, I might have preferred Duke to have been the person history remembered as the first man to stand on the moon, rather than Armstrong, but Charlie seemed happy to be free of this burden and allowed to live unnoticed. He had come close enough to immortality when he set out to establish the lunar high-jump record. “I squatted down and leaped,” he told the teenaged audience in the church that afternoon, “and I got about five feet up in the air, and my backpack began pulling me over.” His feet had risen up in an awful slow-motion roll, and he found himself falling backward, away from the earth. “I landed flat on my back, just like a turtle. If my suit had split open I would have been dead just like that. But you had confidence in your material—even though everything was made by the lowest bidder.”
As we drove into Austin I was looking at the license plates of the traffic passing by, which said Texas, Texas, Texas. When I was a child and traveled with my family we often played the license-plate game, and all my life I have noticed where cars are from. By now I had bolted on to my own cars the plates of five different states, and each time it involved a modification of identity, which went with the new driver’s license, the new telephone number, the new checking account, the new friends. In the fourteen years since I had graduated from college, I had changed addresses twelve times. I imagined my entry in a friend’s address book, scratched out again and again, Myrtle Street, Marian Street, Forrest Road, the apartment numbers I couldn’t remember now, the phone numbers I might not recognize. In none of these places did I feel at home. I was always passing through, on my way—where?
My uncle had died that year, and he was buried in Atlanta with my mother’s relatives. After the ceremony she and I walked among the tombstones of her mother and father, her aunts and uncles, and people she had known. One of the graves belonged to my sister Marilyn, who had died before I was born. I did not feel at home here, but Mother did, and some of her grief at that moment was the knowledge that she would not in the end lie down with her ancestors, nor would she have her children around her. She would be buried in Dallas, where none of her kinfolk lived. And she felt estranged.
It was not really a “modern” condition. Our forebears had been immigrants and pioneers; they had broken with their native countries; their children had left the farms and entered the cities; their children’s children had moved to the new world; their great-grandchildren were alive and adrift. We had become a rootless tribe; one would have to go back to Wales and Scotland and England and France to find the generations stacked up in the churchyards. By now it would seem that even the instinct for ancestral ties would have been bred out of me, but it was not.
For years I had been living in cities that I didn’t wish to be caught dead in. “What does it matter where you’re buried?” asked Roberta, who is unsentimental about death, and the answer was of course it didn’t matter where you died, it mattered where you lived. But it seemed to me that if you were living in a place where you didn’t want to be buried, you were not really at home. I didn’t want to feel like Charlie Duke on the moon, facing death and realizing that home is far, far away.
Texas, Texas, Texas. I knew its history, its traditions, its nasal accents, its drab landscape. I knew it well enough to hate it more than any place in the world. What a mean and provincial land, how stupidly rich, how desperately insecure, how endless and physically unrewarding! And yet, as we came into Austin, I felt more at home than I had in years.
Charlie gave his speech, and cried when he talked about God, and afterward he put on a white robe and gave the Eucharist to those who wished to receive it. I didn’t know what this ceremony meant to me any longer, but I went forward and accepted the wafer and the wine. I was grateful, even if it meant nothing at all.
A month later, in one of those coincidences that govern life, the editor of Texas Monthly magazine called and offered me a job in Austin. “Come home,” he said. It was a summons I couldn’t resist.
I was crossing the Congress Avenue bridge in Austin on March 30, 1981, when I learned that President Reagan had been shot. By the time I crossed the river I was sobbing and pounding the steering wheel. Seventeen and a half years ago I heard a similar bulletin in Dallas and thought my prayers were answered, something had happened at last. But I had had enough of tragedy now. I could not bear another martyr.
Then details emerged about the assassin’s Dallas background. With every assassination I had waited for exactly this news. That is the mark of the native son; I had come to expect the worst; I believed that somehow the finger would point at me.
The Hinckleys, like my own family, had come to the new world from a small town—Ardmore, Oklahoma—and like us they had been blessed by the boom. Jack Hinckley, the father, was an oilman, an entrepreneur, exactly the kind of man Dallas celebrates and rewards with its admiration. He personified the city’s spirit—stern, religious, politically conservative—and he made money without apology. He worked hard, perhaps too hard, but if that was a sin, what hustling man in Dallas could blame him? He provided his family with comfort, opportunity, and eventually real wealth.
The Hinckleys may have been more successful than most families in Dallas, but their values—their religious materialism, for lack of a better term—were characteristic of the city. They moved to Highland Park, the most exclusive close-in suburb in the city. They bought a yellow-brick house on Beverly Drive, which sported the first private pool ever built in Highland Park and a fully equipped commercial soda fountain. They played golf at the Dallas Country Club and socialized with the city’s elite. On Sundays they went to the Episcopal church. “The Hinckleys fit into the pattern of the parish—redneck Republican, ultraconservative, as I am,” recalled their pastor, Charles V. Westapher. “A solid family, I can see them in my mind’s eye, standing there with their children around them. There was nothing outstanding about John Junior. He wasn’t an achiever. He wasn’t in trouble. He just fades into the mists of time.”
John Hinckley, Jr., was eight years old when Kennedy was killed. He ran home from school to tell his mother the news and was disappointed when she already knew. Then he asked her what the word “assassin” meant.
After Hinckley graduated from Highland Park High School, his parents moved to Colorado and he went to Texas Tech. He was assigned a black roommate. “My naive, race-mixed ideology was forever lad [sic] to rest,” Hinckley wrote about himself. “By the summer of 1978, at the age of 23, I was an all-out anti-Semite and white racialist.” He read Mein Kampf, and then, like Oswald, he formed his own political group that no one else cared to join. Hinckley advertised in gun magazines and urged prospective members to move to Dallas, where he kept his national headquarters. “There will be plenty of friendly help available to those of you who are unfamiliar with the city,” he wrote. “We are even considering opening up a barracks.” He was deluded, of course. However, Hinckley’s politics were not an aberration in Dallas. Politically, he was little different from General Walker.
Hinckley compiled a small library on assassination. In a college paper he wrote a report on Jim Bishop’s book, The Day Kennedy Was Shot, recalling the “oceans of ink and mountains of newsprint” that had been devoted to the president’s murder. It had been the most impressive event in Hinckley’s life. Perhaps his identification with the assassination was increased by the fact that his birthday was the same as Kennedy’s. Later, he purchased the same kind of rifle that Oswald had used.
In 1980 Hinckley dropped out of school and told his family that he was working on the copy desk of the Dallas Morning News. Instead, he soon left town and began stalking President Carter, deciding on two occasions not to kill him, despite opportunities. In Nashville he was arrested when he tried to slip through airport security with a suitcase full of guns. He paid a sixty-two-dollar fine and flew back to Dallas—“back,” one of his psychiatrists testified, “to replenish the arsenal.” He went to Rocky’s Pawn Shop on Elm, the same street that runs past the Texas School Book Depository, and bought two .22-caliber revolvers for forty-seven dollars each. He used one of them to shoot Ronald Reagan and three other men on a rainy sidewalk outside the Washington Hilton.
Who was John Hinckley, Jr.? In the minds of many of us who were in Dallas on November 22, 1963, there was something dreadfully familiar about him. He was the assassin we had imagined for ourselves, the right-wing Dallas killer we had thought was in the School Book Depository. He was the killer who would have given justice to the accusation that Dallas killed Kennedy. He was the monster of our guilty dreams. And isn’t that the nature of tragedy, that all our dreams come true?
Five days before he was shot, Ronald Reagan attended a “command performance” at Ford’s Theater in Washington. It was a strange episode: an American president, himself an actor, applauding and being applauded by other actors, in a place where actors will always be disgraced. He seemed to be taunting fate. Already he was being stalked by Hinckley, who had made his own pilgrimage to Ford’s Theater a few months before.
As a child I watched Reagan on television every week, hosting “General Electric Theater” or “Death Valley Days.” When my father was president of the Ponca City, Oklahoma, Chamber of Commerce, he invited Reagan to speak, and afterward Mother came home with a signed program, utterly starstruck. I was ten years old and had never seen my parents so dazzled. “He’s so commanding” was the phrase my mother used. My father had sat next to him on the dais, and was strongly impressed and charmed.
But it was Kennedy, not Reagan, who became my hero, more in death than in life. Since then I had yearned for a great man to come forward; instead, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter—all failed in diverse and tragic ways, and I stopped waiting for heroes. Their failure was a part of the struggle of the new world to take control from the old Establishment—Kennedy’s Establishment. With Reagan’s election the transfer of power was finally accomplished.
There was, as one looked at them now, not that much difference between the politics of Kennedy and those of Reagan. Whatever his intent, Kennedy’s primary goals in office had been to build up the national defenses, stand up to the Soviets, cut taxes, and cure the deficits through growth. Twenty years before, Kennedy’s politics sounded like liberalism, but after two decades of liberal presidents, the same agenda in Reagan’s hands was seen as reactionary conservatism. One felt the extreme gravity of the center.
Coming into office each man brought with him large preconceptions about what kind of country we were, expectations about what kind of future we might have. Reagan himself often looked back to Kennedy, and the Kennedy moment, as a prelude to his own presidency. During his reelection campaign, Reagan spoke in Waterbury, Connecticut, and recalled Kennedy’s own speech in that town twenty-four years before. “It was three o’clock in the morning, his campaign was near ending, and he was exhausted,” Reagan said. “But the night was bright with lights and they lit the faces of tens of thousands of people below.
“And even though it was the fall, it seemed like springtime, those days. I see our country today, and I think it is springtime for America once again.”
Yes, there was hope again, and one did remember those exciting days when America seemed about to bloom—until Kennedy went to Dallas to meet death and the hopes he had excited rained upon us like the fallout from a nuclear blast. Since then I had been afraid to give myself to a political leader, because it was love of that sort, love of a great symbol, that awakened the assassins. Then Reagan came, a man I had looked upon for much of my life as a nemesis. Perhaps because he wasn’t my president at all, in the way Carter had been—I released some reservation inside me that I had been holding back for so long. Like Kennedy, Reagan’s personality—his strength and wit and charm—overwhelmed his politics. Like Kennedy, he was more illusion than reality, more myth than man, but after the many mortal failures who occupied the space between the two men, I was ready for someone to survive that dreadful office.
And now, like Kennedy, he was shot by a Dallasite, and once again I was washed over with humiliation. No one could say Dallas hated Reagan; he had carried the city by a landslide in 1980, and Highland Park gave him the largest majority of any section of town. Before he fired, Hinckley called out “President Reagan! President Reagan!” It was a respectful cry. Then he knelt in a shooting posture and the shots—such small noises—popped and popped and men fell. The scene recalled the basement of the Dallas city hall, when Ruby murdered Oswald on TV. It was all happening again. And what would follow? Confusion, despair, guilt, and once again, the dolorous funeral, the gathering of princes, the enduring sense of vacancy, the rain of exploded promises.
But this time the President lived. He had enough of the Hollywood hero left in him to write his own ending to the nightmare. It seemed to me that an evil spell had been broken.
Because Reagan survived, Dallas was spared in the press. The Republican party even decided to hold its 1984 convention there. In Dallas, the convention was seen as a chance for redemption, an opportunity to show the world that Dallas was forgiven at last.
I approached Dallas cautiously. Although I had come home to the new world, I had not yet made peace with my hometown. I had noted on my occasional visits that the city was growing up, diversifying, becoming in various ways more like the rest of the nation. It was a city now of fine restaurants and galleries, international flights, compelling architecture—that was a destiny it was bound to have. But it was also a city of funky nightclubs, arty movies, experimental theater—a place with texture at last. Although it was still overseen by a white male mayor, at a time when cities all over the country were changing the guard, one could not say it was just a white man’s town. It had been changed, like all cities, by the flood of immigrants, who brought their own customs and their own restaurants and grocery stores, and their energy and expectations. The monopoly of opinion and belief had been broken. The newspapers were the best in the state. Dissent spoke in a louder voice now.
I was surprised to find my own father the object of community protests. When we first moved to Dallas, my father was dismayed, as everyone is, by its lack of natural beauty; physically, the city is like a mail-order bride. East Dallas, which stretches between Lakewood and downtown, had some of the most charming homes in the city, but they were decayed and chopped into tenements. My father decided to risk loan money in the area, which had been redlined by every financial institution in town. His bank made loans to young couples with no more equity than their willingness to rehabilitate those old houses. At the same time, the Lakewood shopping center, which encompassed my father’s bank, was rundown and neglected, and he went to every shopkeeper and asked him personally to spruce up his store, to remove the piles of trash in back, to consider planting trees and taking down obtrusive signs. Life magazine publicized his clean-up campaign with a photograph of my father holding a broom: “The garbage king of Dallas,” he was called. He had an effect. He persuaded the city to landscape the traffic islands. His lending program became a model for the nation. After a while Lakewood got to be a more attractive place to live, not lovely but respectable, with a small-town charm that is unique in the city. To a considerable degree this was the result of my father’s efforts. So when he proposed to tear down a portion of the shopping center to build a tower for his bank, he was astounded by the outcry he heard in the community. I listened to my father’s side of the story with mixed feelings. I knew how much he had poured himself into the neighborhood, but I was also sympathetic with his opponents. They have a vision that is different from his. The new world they desire is not one of shiny office towers but old stucco hardware stores. It was a sign, I thought, of a better city that such arguments were taking place.
On the other hand—of course the office tower would be built. Dallas is an urge toward the future. There is a price to pay for living in a city that is continually being born, and it can be measured in the lost feeling of rootedness that old hardware stores provide. To love Dallas is to be able to live without the consolations of the past. To love Dallas is to celebrate the thrill of the new, to smile at the building cranes on the horizon and the bulldozers clearing the pasture beyond the latest development. It takes courage to live in a city that never pauses. It’s a kind of courage I don’t think I have.
In the days before the convention people were talking nervously about the city’s image. The Dallas police announced that they would not give jaywalking tickets to out-of-towners. The mayor lectured cabdrivers about hospitality. Dallas still hated disorder, which national conventions naturally attract. Its approach was to make friendly overtures to the protest leaders and then corral them in a makeshift campground on the Trinity River levee, directly behind the jail. A “protest square” was set aside for the Gay-Lesbian Alliance, the Iranian students, the International Women for Justice, the Gray Panthers, et cetera—it was Dallas’s way of imposing order on chaos. Despite these efforts one could sense the anxiety in the city as the delegates swarmed into town. The city police borrowed reserve officers from the suburbs. The jail was cleared to make room for mass arrests. Even the local punk rockers were concerned about the city’s image and put out the word to visiting punkers to “cool it” during the convention. Once again the eyes of the world were turning to Dallas, and there was an unstated feeling that disaster awaited, that the city was jinxed.
Dallas built its capacious new convention center on a rise above the old municipal cemetery, which was now patrolled by mounted policemen. Their horses nibbled the grass around the graves of dead Confederates. Behind the new center is the old Memorial Auditorium, where Adlai Stevenson was assaulted. A block away stands the Kennedy memorial. There were ghosts all around.
This was a convention with nothing to decide. Ronald Reagan would be renominated; George Bush would be his running mate—a California-Texas, new world ticket that was certain to win. The reporters were bored. I spent most of my time on the periphery, going to meetings in hotels, talking to protesters in the tent city; I even went to a fashion show for Republican wives.
In one of the hotels, to my amazement and delight, I met the man who got my first presidential vote, Eldridge Cleaver. I had followed his career since then with occasional interest; I heard he was back from his exile in Algeria, that he had experienced a religious conversion, and that he was in Republican politics in California. He was graying now, and he wore a pin-striped suit with a red club tie. I was reminded of his brief excursion as a fashion designer, which was notable mainly because of his use of codpieces in men’s pants. These days he designed clothing only as a hobby, Cleaver told me. “I should have met some Republicans before I went into business,” he said with a quick, self-deprecating grin. To make a living now he fabricates flowerpots in his backyard. He was here to speak for the Populist Conservative Tax Coalition, a group of far-right Republicans who oppose, among other things, welfare, income tax, and what Cleaver, the former Marxist, described as the Communist effort to destabilize our government.
Outside, in the protest square, I went to hear a punk band called the Dead Kennedys. “We’d like to do a song for you called ‘Religious Vomit,’ ” one of them said. The young people around me reminded me of myself not so long ago. They were celebrating absurdity. I stood there, not understanding their music but really savoring the perversity of the moment, which could not have meant so much outside of Dallas. One of the Dead Kennedys looked out at the skyscrapers, which stood like gleaming monoliths of mirrored glass. “Cop glass,” he called it, and it did look like the reflective sunglasses favored by the policemen who surrounded the square and watched from rooftops and sat on the tombstones on the hillside. Like them, the buildings were cool and official, impenetrable; there was about them the same protective need for order, a loathing for weirdness, a smug sense of power and of the capacity for retribution, which is all in the face of the new world.
In the crowd, punks with pink hair and pierced noses wandered among the Concerned Christians for Reagan and the Young Americans for Freedom and various delegates who had slipped out of the convention to hear the music. I met Richard Jacobs, who was standing aside and shaking his head—not at the punks, he said, but at himself. “I was a hippie in California. I lived in a commune and had a beard down to here. The person I am today I probably wouldn’t have talked to twelve years ago.” He was now a gas distributor and a Republican delegate from Jackson, Tennessee. Then we began to chat with Mark Von Zenicht, who wore a spiked Mohawk seven inches high, chains, handcuffs, a safety pin in his ear, and a black cross on his forehead. Mark owns an apartment building in Oak Cliff, Oswald’s old neighborhood. In a moment he and Richard were complaining together about government regulation. I thought again about what a strange country I was living in, how we all change, how surprised we seem to be about who we are. In the background the Dead Kennedys were singing “Everybody knows this country’s gonna blow, and it’s gonna blow—sky high!” It was a refrain I had sung myself in another form, in another time, when I was romantic, existential, violent, when I craved disorder and change, but as I listened to Richard and Mark talk about property rights, the revolution seemed like an old dead dream no one really wanted.
I stood in the press gallery in the convention hall and stared out at the mass of Republican faces, noticing the tiny glints of diamonds among them. They were the same people I had grown up with in Dallas; they were proud, decent, religious, provincial, but now they were in power. It had taken them a quarter of a century, but here they were, victorious already and certain of victory again, and speaking of their own revolution, the Reagan revolution.
The power of America had shifted to the new world. The 1980 census found a majority of Americans living in the South and West. The same electoral base Nixon lost with in 1960 would have brought him victory now. Within a few years a quarter of the population would be living in Florida and Texas and California alone. What would the new world do with this power? It was still raw and brooding, more comfortable being on the resentful margins of power than in the complex center. The qualities that brought the new world to power were those of the grasping outsider. What it had offered to the country until now was cheap land and cheap labor. It had grown wealthy not through the establishment of great industries but by selling off its oil and gas and timber. It had little of the institutional or cultural maturity of the Northeast and few political leaders whose scope of vision extended beyond their own precincts. And yet the future of the country—and to a large extent, I fear, the future of the world—depended on the capacity of the new world to lead America. I had only to look inside myself to sense the uncertainty of that challenge.
Before Reagan came to the podium to accept the Republican nomination, there was a film about his rise to power, from Illinois to Hollywood to the California governor’s mansion, and after three tries, to the White House. One image caught my eye: it was Reagan on his ranch in Santa Barbara, riding a white horse. I remembered that old call for a “man on horseback” to lead the nation; that was what Ted Dealey, the publisher of the Dallas Morning News, had said to Kennedy. It was a curious, recurring image in new world politics, and now I saw it as a prophecy. Buried in the image itself is a Hollywood-manufactured ideal of innocent America, a nostalgia for fallen values of the frontier, and a call for a man from the West. Reagan was the man the new world had wanted all along. And suddenly there he was above me, smiling, giving his modest nod as the cheers poured down upon him. It was a long circle from 1960 to now, when the new world I had discovered growing inside America had come at last to its full stride.
Reagan was the latest and, I suddenly thought, probably the last expression of the World War II generation, which had found its first champion in Kennedy. Even as I looked at Reagan glorying in his moment, I sensed an end in sight—the end of my parents’ time, and the coming of my own.
During the convention I went on a bus with some of the delegates to tour the assassination sites. We traced the route of Kennedy’s motorcade from Love Field, where he landed, to Parkland Hospital, where he was declared dead. We drove down Mockingbird Lane past the Coca-Cola bottling plant and turned onto Lemmon Avenue. In 1963 this was where the crowds had begun to swell, and several times along here Kennedy stopped to shake hands. “They were mostly schoolchildren and housewives,” our guide told us. We went down Turtle Creek Boulevard, the loveliest street in Dallas, where General Walker lived before he sold his house to the Hare Krishnas. We cruised past immense construction pits on Cedar Springs Road, then we turned onto Harwood Street and entered downtown, which loomed above us like a geologic fault. I could imagine what the Secret Service men were thinking as they stared up at the million windows. We rode past the old Municipal Building, where Ruby shot Oswald. Ruby’s nightclub used to be nearby, the guide was saying, but it since has been torn down. It was odd for me to see my hometown this way, as a tourist, and to realize that the assassination had given Dallas something it had always lacked, and always needed: a history.
We stopped at the Texas School Book Depository, which the guide described as a “Greek and Roman commercial building.” One wouldn’t have looked at it twice if Oswald hadn’t been here. There is that word “hallowed,” which only means sacred or holy but which has always had the connotation of being haunted. Battlefields are hallowed. Ford’s Theater is hallowed. Death imposes itself on the imagination; even the scene of a traffic accident or a gangland slaying has this feeling of being in sharper focus. I remember riding on the old two-lane highways of the rural South when I was a child and seeing the white wooden crosses to mark the places where life has made a sudden exit. It is an instinctive mark one wants to leave for others to notice: someone died here, this place is hallowed.
There have been many attempts to have the building torn down, but it has been preserved, in the Dallas fashion, because it is hallowed, and because it is a tourist attraction. It is being used now for county offices. The delegates stood outside and stared at the window from which Oswald fired. “I was in law school at the time,” remembered Buzz Elkins, a state senator from Tennessee. “I walked into the E&E Drug Store across the street from the University of Tennessee, and everybody was crying. It was like somebody hit the whole city with a hammer.” Dolores Brooks, a delegate from Ohio, said she was watching a soap opera while her daughter slept, “and suddenly Cronkite broke in.” I had become a subsidiary guide, pointing out the Grassy Knoll, the spot where Zapruder stood, the Triple Underpass. It’s a function nearly every Dallasite has served. People come from out of town, they stand in Dealey Plaza, and they tell you where they were when it happened. It’s a memory they offer up involuntarily. And you listen, and receive it, because that’s your special privilege as a Dallasite, to be the bearer of their stories.
After the tour was over, I went back to the depository. “It’s just as it was,” said the historian who accompanied me to the sixth floor. “The plywood floor you see partly finished was being laid down on the day of the assassination.” Some cardboard boxes were shoved to one side.
There was a green window with a blue ledge. Bits of the brick around the window had been chipped away by souvenir hunters. There were water stains on the floor. “People remark on how small it is, how close the environment is,” said the historian. I looked out the window from Oswald’s perspective. A hot breeze stirred. Above the Triple Underpass a train was crossing. In the street below tourists were gesturing, and some of them brought flowers. There was a bare spot on the grass where people stood to have their pictures taken.
Before me was Dallas. It was not at all the city it had been when I came here, so long ago now. Kennedy had spoken in the 1960 campaign of “a new world to be won—a world of peace and good will, a world of hope and abundance.” In the melodrama we had made of Kennedy’s death it seemed that the promise of America had been extinguished in Dallas. But as I saw the city now, bursting with “vigor,” as Kennedy would have said, I saw the new world he promised fulfilled in the place of his death. It was not the world he would have made. It was ambitious but flawed, no longer innocent. I mourned Kennedy once again. And yet I would not call him back. I could not see into that other world, the America that might have been, the me I might have been.
I suddenly saw the ghosts rise up and depart.