That Awful Day

In traveling to Antiques Roadshow events around the nation every summer, I always try to schedule an extra day to take in the sights and sounds of a city --- a museum, or a hoppin’ section of town, or a baseball game in the city’s stadium, or a historical site. In Dallas in June 2008, my top destination involved the latter: I wanted to visit Dealey Plaza, the site of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

I wasn’t quite 4 at the time of the JFK tragedy, but my folks have always been admirers of the popular president. Over the years, I’ve enjoyed hearing their take on the Kennedy years. And as legions of people have, I’ve read reams of printed material and watched hours of documentaries about the “Camelot” years. So visiting the site where it all came crashing down was intriguing to me.

If you know Dealey Plaza only by grainy footage and black-and-white photographs, you likely have a feel for what it looks like --- especially the view from the “grassy knoll” area, where Abe Zapruder happened to capture the assassination on film. But there’s nothing like actually setting foot on that soil, walking up Elm Street, and looking up at the Texas School Book Depository. The building from which the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald (or one of the assassins, if you’re a conspiracy theorist), fired his shots is now the Dallas County Administration Building. The sixth floor of the structure is a museum that encapsulates JFK’s life and death in narrative, photographs, films, and memorabilia.

As you survey the area, you can’t help but picture the images you’ve seen from Nov. 22, 1963. Look hard enough and you can almost see Kennedy’s motorcade driving by the Book Depository, and then curling toward the grassy knoll, with rows of onlookers lining the sides of the street on that sunny, innocent day. And then you can only imagine those shots ringing out....


At one point on the morning I was visiting, a siren suddenly went off and an ambulance came speeding down the street. The shrill sound and the hurried pace of the vehicle got my heart beating a little faster.

At another point, I climbed atop the concrete retainer wall upon which Zapruder stood to shoot his footage. You can see instantly why he chose the spot: It gave him a great view up Elm Street so he could capture the motorcade approaching. Instead, he found himself filming a shocking 25-second span that still haunts America.

Standing on the Zapruder wall, I got a good look at two eerie symbols: a pair of white Xs painted onto the Elm Street pavement to mark the location of Kennedy’s limousine when he was struck. A few feet away from the Xs, embedded at the edge of the knoll, is a small National Park Service plaque. The stark notation, oddly, doesn’t mention the president: It reads, “This site possesses national significance in commemorating the history of the United States of America.”

Later, after touring The Sixth Floor Museum, I walked back to my hotel feeling, honestly, quite depressed. Then I thought about something I saw at Antiques Roadshow the day before: a wonderful 1960 JFK campaign poster reading “A Time for Greatness.” (Appraiser Rudy Franchi was impressed with the poster, noting that its retail value is $6,000–$8,000.) The image of a young JFK as presidential candidate serves as a visual reminder of a more hopeful time. So for me, that large, colorful poster is a far better way to connect JFK to Dallas. The grassy knoll, on the other hand, just feels like an awful place, made so by an awful act on an awful day.