White House photographer Cecil Stoughton took this
picture of Lyndon Johnson taking the oath of office
aboard Air Force One on Nov. 22, 1963. Stoughton
died earlier this month.
In days gone by, it seems, there was more of a fuss made on November 22 — the anniversary of the Kennedy assassination here in Dallas.
In the past, a dedicated group of researchers has gathered at the site of the assassination on this date every year, and I assume they assembled downtown again this year, although I've heard nothing about it. Perhaps there will be something about it on the evening news — although the attention in Texas recently seems to be riveted to the north and tonight's Texas Tech-Oklahoma football game.
There may be some media outlets in some places where they are reflecting on the assassination today. But the only acknowledgement of the 45th anniversary that I’ve found locally is an article in the Dallas Morning News that talks about how the passage of time has claimed many of the witnesses.
Archivist Richard Trask told the Morning News, "It was an event that became a whodunit, and now it’s in the realm of history."
Occasionally, the emergence of new technology (for example, DNA technology or computer graphics) permits us to ask and sometimes answer questions about the mysteries of history.
Very rarely, however, do those questions yield answers that allow us to authoritatively rewrite the story.
Today it seems there are no new questions to ask — and no new answers to consider — in the Kennedy assassination.
If there were, I suppose they would be airing on The History Channel tonight.
But the only assassination-oriented programming on The History Channel this weekend will be aired on Sunday night at 8 p.m. (Central) — and that program, "The Kennedy Assassination: Beyond Conspiracy," is five years old and the moderator, Peter Jennings, died in 2005.
Clearly, there will be nothing new in that program.
I remember watching it when it was aired for the first time — around the 40th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination.
I recall that the big promotional point about the program was a computer animation based on the Zapruder film.
But, while the animation was interesting, I had to wonder what value it provided. To me, it seemed open to many interpretations, and Jennings and ABC seemed overly eager to use the one that supported the conclusions of researcher Gerald Posner.
Posner, whose 1993 book "Case Closed" took the position that both Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby acted alone and that the Kennedy assassination was not the result of a conspiracy, was given extensive airtime as an expert in the case.
It also seems to me that the program devoted much of its time to discussions of Oswald’s life and the opinions of his brother — who, like other members of his family, seemed to enjoy the attention even if the price of admission was his brother’s life.
From a documentary standpoint, I would recommend "Four Days in November" as the best way to remember Kennedy today — but you may have to rent it someplace.
That film was shown on Turner Classic Movies a couple of months ago, but I’m not aware of any TV station that is planning to show it today — or in the near future.
However, if you’d like to ponder all the questions about the assassination that still haven’t been answered after all these years, I recommend the Director’s Cut of Oliver Stone’s "JFK," a film that was originally released 17 years ago but has yet to produce definitive answers to nearly all of the questions it raised.
American Movie Classics will be presenting "JFK" tonight — at 7 p.m. and 11 p.m. Central. I don’t know if it is the Director’s Cut, but I do know that AMC edits its presentations and interrupts them with commercials — so my guess is that it’s the original theatrical version with some audio and possibly some video edited.
