The New Yorker's George Packer: Leaving Dealey Plaza [View all]

[cali]

Ever since the age of seven, I’ve been obsessed with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It took place when I was three, and though I have no memory of hearing the news, the President’s murder, in Dallas, hung over my childhood with the vivid and riveting terror of a dream. On my parents’ bookshelf, there was a slender, crimson-jacketed pictorial account of November 22, 1963—fifty years ago next month—and the days that followed, by the photographers of the Associated Press, called “The Torch Is Passed.” I would sit by myself for what felt like hours and stare at the black-and-white stills—the roses in Jackie’s arms at Love Field; the open Presidential limousine gleaming in the sunlight; the waving, unknowing crowds; Kennedy’s smile in the images just before the first shot; Jackie’s face turning toward him as his fists jerk up to his throat; the black shoe hanging over the back of the seat as the limo speeds away toward the underpass.

This silent nightmare remains active down in the lower muck of my unconscious: a Zapruder film that never stops playing, in a continuous loop, but always carries the force of the first viewing. In Don DeLillo’s “Underworld,” a woman named Klara watches that film, the most famous home movie ever shot, in a private art installation in New York, where it is being screened in several rooms at different speeds, and she feels that it somehow exposes the workings of the mind:

The footage seemed to advance some argument about the nature of film itself…. She thought to wonder if this home movie was some crude living likeness of the mind’s own technology, the sort of death plot that runs in the mind, because it seemed so familiar, the footage did—it seemed a thing we might see, not see but know, a model of the nights when we are intimate with our own dying.

At seven, I had no strong feelings about Kennedy himself, and I still don’t. He was an attractive person and a better-than-average President. His extremely public murder was a shock from which the country never recovered. But my connection with it has nothing to do with the usual story of generational idealism and disillusionment. Nor am I interested in the apparently inextinguishable question of a conspiracy. I’ve always assumed that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone—not because I’m steeped in millions of pieces of evidence but because the randomness of a lone gunman fits my primal sense of the assassination as its own self-contained event, mythic, without reference to anything outside itself, entirely confined within Dealey Plaza, taking exactly the 26.6 seconds of Abraham Zapruder’s color-saturated 8-mm. Bell & Howell Zoomatic footage. It has to happen, it’s foreordained to happen, you can’t believe that it will happen, that it is happening. The public drama of history and the private encounter with death: those were the discoveries that kept me staring at the pages of that book.

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