Closer Than That:The assassination of J.F.K., fifty years later
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NOVEMBER 4, 2013 ISSUE
Closer Than That
The assassination of J.F.K., f ifty years later.
BY ADAM GOPNIK
P
Governor and Mrs. John Connally, of Texas, with the Kennedys, in the Presidential limousine, in Dallas, November 22, 1963.
COURTESY INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY
oets are not the unacknowledged legislators
of the world, lucky for us, but they can be
worldly judges of poetic legislators. Lincoln’s soul survives in Whitman’s words, and
the response of American poets to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, fifty years
ago, suggests that there really was, beyond the hype and the teeth, an interesting man
in there. An entire volume of mostly elegiac poems, “Of Poetry and Power,” with a
Rauschenberg silk-screen portrait of the President for its cover, came out within
months of his murder. (It was even recorded, complete, on Folkways Records.)
ohn Berryman wrote a “Formal Elegy” for the President (“Yes. it looks like
wilderness”); Auden an “Elegy for J.F.K.,” originally accompanied by twelve-tone
music by Stravinsky. Robert Lowell—who in the Second World War had gone to
prison as a conscientious objector, and in the late sixties became a Pentagon-bashing
radical hero—wrote to Elizabeth Bishop that the murder left him “weeping through
the first afternoon,” and then “three days of television uninterrupted by advertising
till the grand, almost unbearable funeral.” The country, he said, “went through a
moment of terror and passionate chaos.” Lowell’s friend and fellow-poet Randallarrell called it the “saddest” public event that he could remember. Jarrell tried to
write an elegy but could get no further than “The shining brown head.”
This passionate chaos was set loose, then, in every back yard. It is easy to be cynical
about it in retrospect—being cynical about it in retrospect is by now a branch of
American historical studies—and say that the poets’ overwrought grief was the
product of a sleight of hand worked by Jackie, no other group so easily bought as
American writers. (Even the Salingers were invited to the White House—and Mrs.
Salinger wanted to go!) But there was more than that. The death of J.F.K. markedthe last time the highbrow reaches of the American imagination were complicit in
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the dignity of the Presidency. In Norman Mailer’s “Presidential Papers,” published
the month Kennedy died, the point is that there was a “fissure in the national
psyche,”* (#editorsnote) a divide between the passionate inner life of America and its
conformist, repressed official life: “The life of politics and the life of myth had
diverged too far.” For Mailer, Kennedy’s Presidency supplied the hope of an
epiphany wherein the romantic-hero President would somehow lead his people on
an “existential” quest to heal this breach. It sounded just as ridiculous then, but there
was something gorgeous in the absurdity.
Of course, people made fun of Kennedy—the Kennedy impersonator Vaughn
Meader was the single biggest loser after the assassination. (“Poor Vaughn Meader,”
Lenny Bruce is said to have muttered in his standup act on the night of the killing.)
And the John Birch right wingers hated him as implacably as their children do
Obama. But the king always has his fool, and the haters were largely marginalized.
Lowell wondered what character in Shakespeare Bobby, the dour younger brother,most resembled. Finding Shakespearean dimensions in politicians was an accepted
sport. This kind of contemplation became increasingly incredible in the years that
followed. (L.B.J. could be Macbeth, but only as the burlesque MacBird.) Reagan and
Clinton were both larger-than-life figures drawn from simpler American
entertainments—Mr. Deeds and the Music Man, the wise innocent in power or the
lovable fast-talking con man who turns out to be essential to everyone’s happiness.
Kennedy, by contrast, was still seen as a king of divine right out of the seventeenth
century—the subject of endless reverie about his capacity to renew the world. And
so the obsession with his body, that shining head, recalling the seventeenth-century
French court watching the King sleep and rise and defecate, leads in the end to the
grisly conspiracy-theory compulsion to review every square inch of his autopsied
body. (One conspiracy theorist, David Lifton, said once that he never married
because every would-be bride realized that he was more interested in the President’s
dead body than in her living one.)
The nation really did get turned inside out when Kennedy was killed, as nations do
at the death of kings. But what altered? In many ways, it was a time more past thanpresent. Though it’s said that the event marked the decisive move from page to
screen, newspaper to television, all the crucial information was channelled through
the wire-service reporters, who, riding six cars back from the President’s, were the
first to get and send the news of the shots, and were still thought of as the
authoritative source. Walter Cronkite’s two most famous moments—breaking into
“As the World Turns” to announce, “In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired”; and his
later, holding-back-tears “From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official: President
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T
Kennedy died at 1 P.M. Central Standard Time”—were in both cases simply read
from the wire-service copy. You can see the assistants ripping the copy from the
teleprinter and rushing it to the anchorman.
Yet an imbalance between the flood of information and the uncertainty of our
understanding—the sense that we know so much and grasp so little, and that reality
becomes an image passing—does seem to have begun then: the postmodern
suspicion that the more we see, the less we know. A compulsive “hyperperspicacity,”
in the term of one assassination researcher—the tendency to look harder for pattern
than the thing looked at will ever provide—became the motif of the time. To dive
into the assassination literature fifty years on—to read the hundreds of books, with
their hundreds of theories, fingering everyone from Melvin Belli to the Mossad; to
visit Dealey Plaza on trips to Dallas; and to venture in the middle of the night onto
the assassination forums and chat rooms—is to find two truths overlaid. The first
truth is that the evidence that the American security services gathered, within thefirst hours and weeks and months, to persuade the world of the sole guilt of Lee
Harvey Oswald remains formidable: ballistics evidence, eyewitness evidence, ear-
witness evidence, fingerprint evidence, firearms evidence, circumstantial evidence,
fibre evidence. The second truth of the assassination, just as inarguable, is that the
security services collecting that evidence were themselves up to their armpits in
sinister behavior, even conspiring with some of the worst people in the world to kill
the Presidents of other countries. The accepted division of American life into two
orders—an official one of rectitude, a seedy lower order of crime—collapses under
scrutiny, like the alibi in a classic film noir.
“Know why you couldn’t figure this one, Keyes?” the guilty Walter Neff (Fred
MacMurray) tells his virtuous insurance colleague Barton Keyes (Edward G.
Robinson) at the end of the great “Double Indemnity,” in a taunting confession. “I’ll
tell ya. Because the guy you were looking for was too close. Right across the desk
from ya.” Keyes’s beautiful, enigmatic rejoinder is: “Closer than that, Walter.” He
means that the cop and the killer share more than they knew before the crime, that
temptations that lead to murder are available to us all; the lure of transgressionmakes us closer than we think.
hese two truths lead you not so much to different claims as to different worlds.
Every decade or so, the Oswald-incriminating facts are comprehensively
reviewed—most recently by Vincent Bugliosi, in a thousand-plus-page volume,
“Reclaiming History” (Norton)—and, every decade, people who don’t care tend to
accept those facts, while the people who care most remain furious and unpersuaded.
The world of the conspiracy buffs has a bibliography and a set of fixed points that
run parallel to but separate from reality as it is usually conceived. The buffs, for
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instance, rely heavily on the memoir of Madeleine Brown, who claims to have been
one of L.B.J.’s mistresses, and to have been told by him, the night before the murder,
“Those goddam Kennedys will never embarrass me again!” The buffs debate
whether she is wholly, largely, or only sporadically reliable. In the latest volume of
Robert Caro’s L.B.J. biography, by contrast, Brown is not thought worth mentioning,
even to disprove. (In any case, the key conspiracy scene she paints, a kind of pre-
assassination party at the millionaire Clint Murchison’s Dallas house, attended by
ohnson, J. Edgar Hoover, and Richard Nixon, has been conclusively debunked. No
record of it exists in any Dallas newspaper, and Johnson can be safely placed in
Houston that night.) In the same way, the buffs take for granted the role of Joseph
Kennedy, first as a bootlegger, then as a campaign fund-raiser for his son entangled
with the Mafia, and argue about whether the Mafia alone was the killer or the Mafia
in league with the C.I.A. Joe Kennedy’s guilty past is the entire pivot of the
assassination in a new conspiracy book, ominously titled “The Poison Patriarch,” by
Mark Shaw (Skyhorse); and the same idea is dramatized in the screenwriter WilliamMastrosimone’s Broadway-bound play “Ride the Tiger.” Yet David Nasaw’s recent,
far-from-admiring biography of old Joe dismisses as complete legend the notion that
he ever made a penny as a bootlegger or worked closely with the Mob. (He made his
money in Hollywood and on Wall Street, mobs of their own.)
“I’m sorry, sir, but 311 cannot bring you hangover nachos.”
Bugliosi handles the conspiracy theorists with a
relentless note of sarcastic condescension. But
there are ways in which the pattern-seeking is a
meaningful index of the event, and gives us more
insight into its hold fifty years on than the
evidence does. A web without a spider still catches
the light. There are distinct period styles in paranoia. The first generation of
assassination obsessives—Josiah Thompson, still writing; Harold Weisberg, longdead—were essentially hopeful proceduralists, men and women with thick files and
endless clippings, convinced that due scrutiny of the record would reveal sufficient
inconsistencies, opacities, and falsehoods to compel the reopening of the entire case.
Their model was journalists of the I. F. Stone kind, the isolated man of integrity who
could find the truth by scrutinizing the record.
The second kind of assassination obsessive emerged only later, in the mid-seventies.
Where the proceduralists believe that the truth is in there, buried in some forgotten
file folder, the fantasists believe, “X Files” style, that the truth is out there—available
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to those bold enough to imagine on the right scale of American extravagance. An
exemplar here was David Lifton’s book “Best Evidence,” published in 1981, but his
theories percolated at lectures and conferences throughout the seventies. He put
forward an obviously mad idea with admirable logic: that the President’s body was
secreted away between the killing and the autopsy, and his wounds altered.
The paradox is that, just as Thomas Pynchon or Don DeLillo dramatizes paranoia
with a texture of specificity, the paranoid types are, in their own way, often much
more empirically minded—willing to follow the evidence where it leads, even if that
is right through the looking-glass—than their more cautious confrères. It is, in other
words, possible to construct an intricate scenario that is both cautiously inferential,
richly detailed, on its own terms complete, and yet utterly delusional. The J.F.K.
conspiracy theorists are the first and hardiest of those movements—the truthers and
birthers and moon walkers being their stepchildren—in which the old American
paranoid style, once largely marginal and murmuring, married pseudoscience andbecame articulate, academic, systematized, and loud .
No matter how improbable it may seem that all the hard evidence could have been
planted, faked, or coerced—and that hundreds of the distinct acts of concealment
and coercion necessary would have been left unconfessed for more than half a
century—it does not affect the production of assassination literature, which depends
not on confronting the evidence but on discovering new patterns of connection and
coincidence. The buffs’ books—Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann’s “Legacy of
Secrecy,” in development as a major Hollywood film, is a perfect instance—lay out
ever more intricate and multiple patterns of apparent intention and reaction among
Mafia dons and C.I.A. agents, all pointing toward Dealey Plaza. “Had ties with . . .”
is the favored phrase, used to connect with sinister overtones any two personalities
within the web. Waldron and Hartmann dismiss even Oswald’s murder of the Dallas
police officer J. D. Tippit, forty-five minutes after J.F.K.’s assassination, despite the
many witnesses who saw him shoot Tippit, or identified him as the man with the
gun running from the scene.
Arguments like this tend to lead toward the same cul-de-sac, where the skeptic
insists on being shown the spider and the buffs insist that it is enough to point to
the web. One argument can stand for a hundred like it: a key early piece of evidence
for conspiracy is that many of the doctors in the emergency ward at Parkland
Memorial Hospital, where the President was brought from the fatal motorcade, said
that they saw a large wound to the back of J.F.K.’s head, instead of the right front
side, where the later autopsy and X-rays locate it. This is not really hard to explain.
The wound was enormous, and the doctors never examined it, or turned J.F.K. over
to verify that there was a rear head wound. The Zapruder film of the assassination
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shows, unmistakably, that the horrible wound was indeed to the right front side of
his skull, while the back remained intact (aside from the small, almost invisible
entrance wound).
So for the claim of a “rear head wound” to be accurate, it would be necessary for the
Zapruder film to have somehow been altered and turned into a cunning animated
cartoon. That is exactly what the “second generation” of theorists insist—that the
Zapruder film itself is a fabrication, produced, in the words of one buff, “in a
sophisticated C.I.A. photo lab at the Kodak main industrial plant in Rochester, New
York.” Nor is this idea simply asserted. It is patiently argued, step by step, with the
name of the optical printer detailed, even though Kodak’s own expert on 8-mm. film,
Roland Zavada, has dismissed the idea of introducing complex optical-printer effects
onto 8-mm. film in 1963, and declared that “there is no detectable evidence of
manipulation or image alteration on the Zapruder in-camera original and all
supporting evidence precludes any forgery thereto.” A theory that has the Zapruderfilm altered is absurd—but a theory that doesn’t have the Zapruder film altered has
to accept that Kennedy had no rear-exit head wound, and therefore must have been
shot from above and behind.
This constant cycle of sense and speculation is not about to end. Josiah Thompson,
one of the most rational of the skeptics, wrote once that “you pull any single thread,
any single fact, and you’re soon besieged with a tangle of subsidiary questions.” And
this is true: any fact asserted can be met with a counter-fact—some of them
plausible, many disputed, most creating contradictions that are unresolvable. But this
is not a fact about conspiracies. It is a fact about facts. All facts in all inquiries come
at us with their own shakiness, their own shimmer of uncertainty. The threads of
evidence usually seem separate and sure only because life mostly comes at us in
finished fabrics, and nothing requires us to pull the thread. When we do, whenever
we do, there’s a tangle waiting.
Bugliosi makes this point in a practical, prosecutor’s spirit, saying that, once you are
sure of the conclusion, you have to live with the evidentiary inconsistencies: you may not know the answer to a question, but that does not mean that the question is
unanswerable. To take one of many that arise in the assassination case: much used to
be made of the mysterious “three tramps” who were arrested shortly after the shots.
They turned out to be, after long years of speculation . . . three tramps, with
knowable names and mundane histories. It is a safe, though not a certain, bet that
the remaining mysteries will resolve just as mundanely. In the meantime, though,
every fact in the case, no matter how solid-seeming, can be countered by some other
fact, however speculative. Facts provoke new patterns even as they disprove old ones.
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Yet the foundational sense that there were bizarre forces at work in the period,
paranoid and violent and tightly interlocked in the strangest imaginable ways,
and by their nature resistant to the common-sense impulses of ordinary explanation
—this is, as far as one can tell, true. As J.F.K. himself is claimed to have said, apropos
of the then popular coup-d’état thriller “Seven Days in May,” such a coup in the
United States was far from being unthinkable: “It’s possible. It could happen in thiscountry. But the conditions would have to be right. If, for example, the country had a
young president and he had a Bay of Pigs, there would be a certain
uneasiness. . . . Then if there were another Bay of Pigs, the reaction of the country
would be, ‘Is he too young and inexperienced?’ The military would almost feel that it
was their patriotic obligation to stand ready to preserve the integrity of the nation,
and only God knows just what segment of democracy they would be defending if
they overthrew the elected establishment.” (He added that he intended it not to
happen “on his watch.”)
By J.F.K.’s own accounting, the Bay of Pigs was the first failure. In the eyes of the
national-security hawks, the Cuban missile crisis, though presented to the public as a
showdown that Kennedy won, was the second, an exercise in abject appeasement.
Kennedy had refused the unanimous advice of his generals and admirals to bomb
Cuba, and had settled the crisis by giving the Russians what they wanted, the
removal of missiles from Turkey. (This was kept quiet, but the people who knew
knew.) The notion that the Cold War national-security state, which Eisenhower
warned against, might have decided to kill the President is not as difficult to creditas one wishes. There were C.I.A. operatives prepared to kill foreign leaders, some of
them previously friendly, for acts they didn’t like, and to recruit gangsters to do it,
and generals who were eager to invade Cuba even at the risk of nuclear war, and who
resented Kennedy for restraining them. (A veteran journalist, Jefferson Morley, has
been pursuing the trail of a now dead C.I.A. agent named George Joannides
through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, believing that, at a minimum, the
C.I.A. was keeping a much sharper eye on Oswald than it ever wanted known.
Relevant documents are supposed to be released in 2017.)
Oddly, there’s confirmation of this in the work of the Kennedy brothers’ house
historian, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. An establishment figure devoted to maintaining the
image of the Kennedys, and no friend to the conspiracy theorists, Schlesinger made
plain that the Kennedys really did believe themselves to be subject to a hostile
alliance of the military and the C.I.A., largely outside their direct control.
“Intelligence operatives, in the CIA as well as the FBI, had begun to see themselves
as the appointed guardians of the Republic, infinitely more devoted than transient
elected officials, morally authorized to do on their own whatever the nation’s security demanded,” Schlesinger concludes. Ted Sorensen, another Kennedy intimate, wrote
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in his memoir that when Jimmy Carter nominated him, in 1977, to be the director
of central intelligence, agency officials worked furiously (and successfully) to get the
nomination withdrawn, quite possibly because there was evidence about J.F.K.’s
death that they didn’t want him to see. Vincent Bugliosi’s confidence that these
things don’t happen here isn’t shared by those closest to the case.
“O.K., trick or treat, please. Don’t mess with me, lady —I’m on a sugar high.”
n assassination should be significant for
more than its atmospherics. Kennedy’s
should also matter for people who weren’t there,
because something happened in America that
would not have happened had Kennedy lived. Theconventional claim is that optimistic liberalism
died in Dallas. Ira Stoll, in his new book, “J.F.K.: Conservative” (Houghton Mifflin),
makes this claim in reverse: he believes that the path of true conservatism would
have gone more smoothly if Kennedy had not been killed. Stoll sincerely believes
that Kennedy’s spiritual heir was Reagan, while shifty Nixon was the real liberal,
whose heir is—who else?—shifty Obama.
Of course, every American President is in some sense a conservative—there are no
Léon Blums or Salvador Allendes in our record. But Kennedy was a classic Cold
War liberal: someone who believed in confronting the Communists (nonviolently, if
at all possible) and creating a network of social welfare to relieve social anxiety. The
real conservatives of the time, the John Birch Society and the Goldwater wing of the
Republican Party, believed in confronting Communism violently, and in abjuring any
federal programs of civil rights and social welfare, since these were certainly left-
wing and possibly Communist. (Ronald Reagan, after all, came to notice for
crusading against Medicare, the way his successors crusade against Obamacare.)
Unable to explain why the actual right-wingers hated J.F.K. as much as they did,Stoll insists that a conspiracy of leftish doves who surrounded J.F.K.—Sorensen and
Schlesinger, in particular—warped his words and purposes retrospectively: a
conspiracy theory every bit as loony as any from the buffs.
At the other end of the spectrum, Thurston Clarke, in his new book, “J.F.K.’s Last
Hundred Days” (Penguin), argues passionately that J.F.K. was moving ever more
decisively left, flapping his wings like a dove, just before he was killed. The evidence
is that Kennedy began to argue, more loudly than he had before, that American
politicians should do everything possible to avoid provoking a nuclear holocaust that
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would destroy civilization. One would think this a minimal ground of sanity, rather
than a radical departure from orthodoxy—but, as Clarke reminds us, driving to the
very edge of universal destruction was widely seen as an opportunity to outsmart the
Soviets. Conversations about how many million casualties the United States could
endure were not just material for “Dr. Strangelove.” More specifically, the line goes,
Kennedy was planning to get out of Vietnam by the end of 1965, or at least had
made up his mind not to get drawn any farther in. Accounts of private conversations
and notes from National Security Council meetings are played as cards in this game.
eff Greenfield, in his new counterfactual book “If Kennedy Lived” (Putnam),
asserts, along with many other larksome predictions (the Beatles would have gone to
the White House; Ronald Reagan would have got the Republican nomination in
1968), that J.F.K. would never have escalated the war in Vietnam.
It is hard to take these claims as much more than wishful thinking projected
retrospectively onto a pragmatic politician, whose commitment to Cold War verities, while less nihilistic than that of some others, was still complete. It’s true that
Kennedy was not inclined, as his two immediate successors were, to see foreign
affairs as a series of challenges to his manhood; a true war hero, he truly hated war.
But though the compulsions of personality are strong, the logic of American politics
is stronger. Kennedy might well have felt little of the insecurity that troubled
ohnson’s soul as he escalated the war. But exactly the same political circumstances
would have confronted him. Had the North Vietnamese Army been allowed to
march into Saigon in 1965 instead of in 1975, the Goldwater Republicans would not
have said, “Thank God for Kennedy’s wisdom in not wasting tens of thousands of
American lives and millions of Vietnamese ones in an effort to stop what was sure to
happen in any case!” They would have said, “Another country, another region,
fecklessly lost to Communism, and on your watch!” The truth, that the fate of
Vietnam, of crucial importance to the Vietnamese, was of little consequence to
America, or to its struggle with the Soviet Union, was simply a taboo statement on
every side.
aranoid as the period was, it was in ways more open. Oswald’s captors decidedthat he would have to be shown to the press, and arranged a midnight press
conference for him—not something that would happen today—while a lawyer for
the Warren Commission met at length with a Communist pushing a conspiracy
theory. (One doubts that a 9/11 commissioner ever felt obliged to meet with a
truther.) The national-security state might have been in place, but the national-
surveillance state wasn’t, quite.
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Oswald was a kind of wooden pawn of the Cold War era who seemed always on the
verge of being sacrificed. As a teen-ager, he educated himself as a Marxist, and he
remained a fantasist who feasted on James Bond novels—just like the President!—
and subscribed to both mainline Communist and Trotskyite papers, without ever
really grasping the difference between them. When he decided to flee, as a teen-age
marine, to what he imagined to be the socialist paradise of Russia, the K.G.B.
seemed so bewildered that it sent him off to work in a factory in Minsk, and
watched him as unhappily as the American security services did later.
Once again, the problem is not an absence of intelligence; the problem is having too
much intelligence to add up intelligently. Another thousand Oswalds, long since lost
to time, were under scrutiny, too. To take a specific instance: the man whom Oswald
sat next to on the bus to Mexico City turned out to be, certainly unknown to him, a
con man and onetime fanatical Hitler supporter named Albert Osborne. Osborne
earned an appendix in the Warren report; he appears briefly and then vanishes intohistory again. Had he shot someone, we would ask what he was doing there, and
why no one knew more about him than about the odd, long-forgotten defector
Oswald. Oswald’s life reminds us that modernity in America, with its rootless
wanderings and instant connections, permanent dislocations and endless
reinventions, is a kind of coincidence machine, generating two or three degrees of
separation between the unlikeliest of fellows.
What is true of Oswald is true as well of his own assassin, that lesser mystery figure
ack Ruby. Ruby is cast in the buff literature as a sinister Mafia hit man, there to
silence Oswald before he could speak. (The killing of Hyman Roth, in “The
Godfather Part II,” seems modelled on Ruby’s act.) Jack Ruby did seek out Mafia-
connected characters in the months before the assassination—but he seems to have
been trying to get help to put pressure on the American Guild of Variety Artists to
enforce its rules about using unpaid strippers. (He considered his rivals’ amateur
striptease shows to be unfair competition to the polished pro acts at his own joint.)
Again and again, the investigation discloses bizarre figures and coincidences within a web of incident that seem significant in themselves. The case of Judith Campbell
Exner is famous. She really was J.F.K.’s mistress, and a Sinatra girlfriend, and the
mistress of the Chicago Mob boss Sam Giancana, all within a few years. Even if she
wasn’t actually a go-between from one to the other, that would not alter the reality
that she had slept with all three, and so lived in worlds that, in 1963, no one would
have quite believed could penetrate each other so easily. Still more startling is the
case of the painter Mary Pinchot Meyer, who was also unquestionably one of
Kennedy’s mistresses. She was the ex-wife of a high-ranking C.I.A. officer (who
himself had once had pacifist leanings), an intimate of Timothy Leary, at Harvard,
7/25/2019 Closer Than That:The assassination of J.F.K., fifty years later
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/closer-than-thatthe-assassination-of-jfk-fifty-years-later 11/11
20/01/2016 15:16Closer Than That - The New Yorker
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and an LSD user. She was murdered, in 1964, on the towpath in D.C., in murky
circumstances. Even if none of this points toward a larger occult truth—even if her
death was just a mugging gone wrong—the existence of such a figure says something
about the weave of American experience. Worlds that seemed far apart at the time
are now shown to have been close together, unified by men and women of multiple
identities, subject to electric coincidences—no one more multiple than J.F.K.
himself, the prudent political pragmatist who was also the reckless erotic adventurer,
in bed with molls and Marilyns, and maybe even East German spies.
The passion of J.F.K. may lie in the overlay of all those strands and circles. The
pattern—weaving and unweaving in front of our eyes, placing unlikely people in near
proximity and then removing them again—is its own point. Mailer was right when
he claimed that the official life of the country and the real life had come apart, but
who could have seen that it would take a single violent act, rather than “existential”
accomplishment, to reveal how close they really were? Oswald acted alone, but thehidden country acted through Oswald. This is the perpetual film-noir moral lesson:
that the American hierarchy is far more unstable than it seems, and that the small-
time crook in his garret and the big-time social leader in his mansion are intimately
linked. When Kennedy died, and the mystery of his murder began, we took for
granted that the patrician in tails with the perfect family and the sordid Oswald
belonged to different worlds, just as Ruby’s Carousel Club and the White House
seemed light-years apart. When Kennedy was shot, the dignified hierarchy seemed
plausible. Afterward, it no longer did. What turned inside out, after his death, was
that reality: the inner surface and the outer show, like a magician’s bag, were revealed
to be interchangeable. That’s why the death of J.F.K., even as it fades into history,
remains so close, close as can be, and closer than that.
* (#correctionasterisk)“The Presidential Papers” was published the month Kennedy
died, not soon after Kennedy’s death, as originally stated.
Adam Gopnik, a staff writer, has been contributing to The NewYorker since 1986.