OF GRASSY KNOLLS AND UMBRELLA MEN

On the 22^nd of November 1963 the world changed.

The 35^th President of the United States of America was shot and killed by an assassin’s bullet at the age of 46.

The event is seared into the consciousness of pretty much everyone old enough to remember anything on that fateful day, probably because of the very public nature of the event, but also because it was possibly the very first time such a thing had occurred in a time of modern mass media, in the age of television.

Many theories have unfolded in the 47 years since it happened. We no longer seem content to believe that people of such high profile are capable of being struck down so arbitrarily. It’s not acceptable to us that one of the most powerful men on the planet can be killed so easily, any more than we want to believe that something as dull as a car crash can end the life of an icon, or that a movie star with so much to live for might take too many pills or imagine they have nothing more to give when they’re living the life so many others dream of. We have to look for patterns and connections that might not be there, and the closer we look the more we can find. Tales of Grassy Knolls and Umbrella Men and Magic Bullets entangle around each other and weave more tales of conspiracy and counterplot. Eyewitnesses will believe what they think they saw or what they think we want to hear and that will add to the powerful brew.

Later on it turned out that his personal life was less than perfect which made him more of a disappointment to some and more human to others. As time has passed historians have scratched away at this deep wound in the American psyche and found more and more to prove or disprove one theory or another, and delved further and further into the truncated life of this man and more often than not found something lurid and sensational, after all such unveilings tend to sell more copies than choosing to share something obeisant.

All these revelations may well have changed history’s perception of the man, and maybe many will now think less highly of him, although how many of us could have our lives subjected to such close scrutiny and not emerge being found wanting in some way? At least if someone examines the paperwork we accumulate we are still here to defend ourselves, a courtesy the assassin’s act denied him. Sometimes we imperfect human beings very quickly forget how we felt when first we heard something and what our gut reaction was at the time. We allow other opinions to drift in and muddy the waters and dilute our sense of what we think because of hearing what others also think. Sometimes we’ll just switch allegiances in order to remain popular instead of standing tall and sticking to our principles.

I used to think that my own conception was related to the international outpouring of grief and shock and outrage that was felt around the world, but I’m not convinced any more because the dates only “sort of” tally, but it probably explains just a little bit why I have read so much about him over the years.

I do wonder how history will remember such events many generations from now when we are as much ancient history as the Egypt of the Pharoahs seems to us now. Things that we regard as “well known facts” will be twisted and distorted by time and mythology. Will future generations speak of a “great lost king” struck down too young? Will anything else of that decade or even that century be a strong enough or significant enough event to survive the heat of the crucible of time and still be understood the way we understand it now? When the Spartans fought their wars the memory of them would be so vivid and with such rich detail to the men who were there. Can we really ever quite understand those events as they did? Will the people of 5000 A.D. feel the same horror that we do over Gallipoli or the Blitz?

Time will tell, but I imagine that history might not remember the best of us. Ultimately history seems to turn on the pulling of a trigger or the explosion of a bomb. Generally, in history, the good we do seems to fade away but the wickedness manages to remain, or at the very least, something good has to be very good indeed to survive the centuries.

I’m not going to discuss the rights and wrongs of people and their guns here, except to point out something that seems obvious to me but I know isn’t necessarily an opinion held by everyone. Ultimately if you point a gun at somebody you’ve already crossed a line that few of us want to ever have to cross. If you then decide to pull the trigger, you’ve made a choice and will have to live with the consequences, if you get to live at all. Throughout history assassins have become victims fairly quickly. Lee Harvey Oswald died as a direct consequence of the assassination he was accused of committing. Jack Ruby took up a gun and made the same choice to end another man’s life with it. So it goes on.

In the end, what happened in Dallas that unforgettable and tragic day is that a comparatively young man moved into the crosshairs of the telescopic sight of another man’s rifle. A choice was made. A trigger was pulled, a life ended, and the world changed.

The rest is history.