My 2023 column on the JFK assassination for the San Francisco Chronicle, and an addenda...

This tragic event was our nation's tipping point, and it led to the upcoming presidency of Donald Trump.

Six decades after JFK’s assassination, Dealey Plaza is as haunting as ever

By Jack Ohman

Nov 22, 2023

Like millions of Americans, I have been haunted by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in the 60 years since he was murdered on a Dallas street.

The shooting happened while Kennedy, Texas Gov. John Connally, their wives and two Secret Service agents were riding in a 1961 Lincoln Continental, past the banal exterior of the Texas School Book Depository and through a park called Dealey Plaza. 

Today, the plaza is oddly pleasant if you don’t know what happened there. 

My 29-year-old son, a student of Robert A. Caro’s books on President Lyndon B. Johnson,  and I decided to visit Austin, Texas, to see the LBJ Presidential Library and his nearby ranch in the Texas hill country. I suggested that we depart Texas from Dallas, so I could show him Dealey Plaza. He agreed. I hadn’t been there in 38 years. 

Dealey Plaza is virtually unchanged from Nov. 22, 1963. The so-called “Grassy Knoll” is there, intact, save for a new fence where some people erroneously assert that some of the shots were fired. People hawk books and pamphlets there now, a jarring commercial counterpoint to the still-somber scene.

The Texas School Book Depository is now the Dallas County Administration Building, and, on the sixth floor, is a museum dedicated to the assassination.

One can see through now-streaked glass down Elm Street, where, 88 yards away, Oswald fired his last shot into Kennedy’s head.

The wavy window glass was like a clouded prism; the 60 years takes the span of time and imagery and distorts it. It was just yesterday for some, forever for others.

It is most likely that Oswald cooked up this catastrophe in the dank warehouse of his own mental state, an attempt to be, in his mind, a historic revolutionary figure like his hero, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. 

Persuasive evidence exists that Oswald may have told someone of his plans, likely at the Cuban or Russian embassies in Mexico City six weeks before the assassination. To this day, the Central Intelligence Agency withholds useful information about that trip. Why?

In Dealey Plaza and on the sixth floor, I heard truly ridiculous assertions.

A teenager announced, “There is no way that he could have fired seven shots in four seconds.”

That would be three shots in about six seconds, and, yes, for Oswald, a U.S. Marine marksman using a telescopic rifle, a fading target going 11 miles per hour was a rather easy shot.

Behind the Grassy Knoll fence, a woman pronounced, “This is where the shots actually were fired.” No credible photographic or physical evidence supports this. 

On the sixth floor, in the southeast corner of the building, visitors can see a surreal recreation of Oswald’s grimy sniper’s nest. 

I walked my son around the plaza, pointing out where one critical moment after the next happened. Here is where a Dallas steamfitter saw Oswald fire the last shot. Here is where the president’s car disappeared behind the Stemmons Freeway sign. Here is where on Elm Street, at Zapruder film frame 313, a military bullet crashed into Kennedy’s head.

Someone has painted an “X” on the street where Kennedy died in front of young families. You can see them in the films, their parents shielding their children. Years later, one of those children described seeing what he thought was confetti coming from the car.

In a macabre traffic dance, people take selfies on the exact spot in the street where John F. Kennedy died. 

I didn’t see people in their 60s or older doing this, because they remember the moment and where they were when they heard about Kennedy. I vividly remember it as a 3-year-old. My mother, her friend and her daughter, were at our house watching the CBS soap opera “As The World Turns.”

What I recall, fragmentally: The screen going black. Mom and her friends screamed and cried. My father came home from work during the day. Me saying, repetitively, “Kenny dead.” 

I had no idea who “Kenny” was. 

But I knew something was terribly wrong.

As my son and I entered the Book Depository, I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience. The scene was eerily similar to Nov. 22: sunny, low 70s, high noon, the brilliant light, the green grass and the trees, the red brick building, the milling crowds. 

I felt like I was walking in the Zapruder film, an unwanted virtual reality.

In the sniper’s nest, overhead light fixtures appeared to be original, the scuffed wooden floors stained with oil, with exposed pipes in the ceiling.

In the adjacent window, there was essentially Oswald’s view: a winding street somewhat obscured by oak trees, cars drifting away.  I looked at Oswald’s perch, then sat on a bench and wept. My son approached me, picked me up, and said quietly, let’s get the hell out of here. 

A man in his 70s was on the elevator with us. He looked at me. He wasn’t weeping. 

He knew why I was.

Jack Ohman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and writer. He can be reached at jackohman.net, on Instagram at @jackohman60 and Threads at @jackohman60. 

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One year later, I am sitting at my keyboard thinking about Dealey Plaza. The echoes of the shots still reverberate in my mind, a volley directed not just at a president , but at the American spirit itself.

Where are we, 61 years later?

On July 11, 2024, an obscure man in his twenties very much like Lee Harvey Oswald (yes, he did it, alone) fired several shots at now President-Elect Donald Trump, and missed his brain by millimeters, shearing off a piece of the GOP candidate’s left ear.

The would-be assassins name was Thomas Crooks, and his profile could have been created in a Hollywood script conference room. Mostly, these types are now familiar: loner, unusual, obsessive, friendless.

Crooks was using a high-powered assault rifle with a scope from an elevated position. He was killed by Secret Service snipers after getting off several shots, and one poor man was killed in front of his family.

A few weeks later, another, older potential assassin was set up to kill Trump on his golf course. He fled when discovered, and was captured soon after.

It escaped Trump’s public attention that these attempts could have been prevented if this country had enacted an assault weapons ban. Even the late President Ronald Reagan came out against these crazy weapons after his own near-fatal assassination attempt by yet another mentally-ill 20-something.

But no. Gun business as usual. Again.

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President Trump nominated the son of assassinated U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., as his Secretary of Health and Human Services.

For the record, Bobby Kennedy Jr. is quite insane.

His whack job conspiracy theories are worthy of Oliver Stone, who created a movie about his Uncle Jack’s murder, and it was one big lie after another. After all, Stone is a Putin asset now, not a serious film maker, a Leni Reifenstahl of the paranoid.

Bobby Jr. is convinced his father and uncle were killed by men other than the men who obviously killed them, perpetuating even more disinformation.

Now that Bobby’s job is Czar of Health Disinformation, if he’s confirmed, and his father and uncle would be posthumously appalled. If Kennedy’s policy goals are implemented, and there’s no other way to say this: innocent people will die just as sure as if a sniper had killed them from an elevated position on a building.

Dr. Mehmet Oz, another Q-uackjob and Trump Medicare and Medicaid nominee, once opined that he was OK with a two to three percent child mortality rate on children who returned to school during COVID-19.

That’s a million kids.

That’s willful genocide.

What Will Bobby Do?

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I was three when JFK was murdered.

My late mother, our late neighbor Rosemary Arnold, and her daughter Robin were with us on November 22, 1963, watching the CBS soap opera As The World Turns. Suddenly, the screen went black, and a man with a deep voice was saying something.

I remember saying, “Kenny’s dead”.

Who is Kenny?

Robin and I are still here. Robin served our country as a United States Marshall later, and is a dear friend today.

I also recall sitting with Mom and Dad watching the Kennedy funeral. Oswald was brought out, and my dad, a decorated Army veteran, said:

“My God, someone is going to shoot that guy!”

BANG!

I know. Incredible.

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The Zapruder film of the assassination contains odd little moments of humanity. If you look at individual frames, you can see:

A little girl running.

Haunting. She stopped running at the first shot, which was at Frame 169. You can see her freeze and look back. She is how they finally determined the first shot was much earlier. It missed, probably a ricochet off of an oak tree branch.

A man with an umbrella:

.Conspiracy types obsessed on this umbrella, which was held by a man named Louie Steven Witt. He wasn’t there to signal assassins, he was there to protest Kennedy as an appeasing “umbrella man”, a common insult referring to British wartime Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who carried an umbrella bowing to Hitler.

You are going to hear the word “appeasement” a lot until 2028.

Here are Bill and Gayle Newman with their two young sons. It’s a composite by an artist named Gordon Belray, who does fascinating work. This family saw the president’s head shot.

This is a blow-up from a frame during the last shot.

This element is haunting. The man on the right is in mid-fall, which is bone-chilling. The photographer on the left is James Altgens of the Associated Press, who took these:

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Usually when I go to Washington, DC, I go to Arlington National Cemetery to see the graves of President Jack Kennedy and Sen. Bobby Kennedy. Now Sen. Ted Kennedy is there as well.

The last time I was there, there were dozens of people standing in front of the eternal flame with selfie sticks.

Selfie sticks.

Jesus, what have we become?

We now live in the selfie stick moment, with a new President who’s number one political ambition is to be on television, period.

You want to know where we are? It’s pretty clear, now.

You Are Here.

Here is a moment in American history that JFK and RFK worked hard to avoid. Now the incoming president and the nephew of John F. Kennedy will work hard to unravel what the two American heroes accomplished.

We can claw it back, but it’s going to be bad bad bad. Bad.

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When I went to Dealey Plaza in 2023, it stuck me not so much as the historical Kennedy assassination site but more the place where a very young man (46) was murdered by a punk next to his 33 year old wife, which took a father from a three year old son and a six year old daughter.

Younger people walked around Dealey Plaza like it was some macabre amusement park. Older people just stood, some shaking their heads or bowing them. The younger groups took photos. The older people stood stock still.

I wept when I got to the sixth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository. Wept. Had to sit down. Sobbed. My son took me out. I don’t know if I can ever visit again. I looked at the grimy oil-stained floor and the exposed beams of the ceiling and thought, how could this have ever happened? How could some asterisk of a man alter everyone’s life like this, including mine? For what? So he could have a show trial, which was his lifelong ambition.

Oswald was a nihilist, not a Marxist. His barely-literate writing showed that he wanted to blow up the system. Read his journal entries. There’s the motive that the conspiracy people conveniently overlook. Congratulations Lee Harvey Oswald of 1026 North Beckley, in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas, Texas. You succeeded. You created the paranoia culture that eventually elected Donald J. Trump.

We’re all surfing the shock waves from November 22, 1963, and will continue to do so until this country re-calibrates, which may not happen in my lifetime. It will happen, because these people always eventually fall.

We can hear those shots, even if there’s no credible existing recording of them. Oswald, a loser in a boarding house, made sure of that.

On November 22, think of what we lost, but also what we can learn.

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Folks, thank you so much for your financial support. You’ve saved my career, and for that I am eternally grateful. I keep the paywall down so others can sample my work and maybe eventually feel like kicking in. I am in your debt. —J.

Jack Ohman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and writer. He can be reached at jackohman.net, on Instagram at @jackohman60 and Threads at @jackohman60.