The Sixth Floor Museum Puts Us on the Spot, on November 22, 1963

The Dallas museum digs deeply into JFK’s assassination and beyond.

L ast week I was in Dallas and Fort Worth to see the magical Bonnard exhibition at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) is the ultimate warm-me-up artist, based as he was, most of the time, on the Riviera, so I’ll write about the exhibition and the Kimbell’s 50th anniversary in December, when it’s cold.

Today, I’ll write about another anniversary and another museum. I’d never been to the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas. It’s the riveting museum treating the murder of President Kennedy. This coming November 22 is the 60th anniversary of an event that was world-shaking, era-defining, tragic, and, still these days, a maker of brawls. The museum is located on Dealey Plaza, mostly on the sixth floor of the former Texas School Book Depository from which Lee Oswald shot Kennedy and changed history. Visiting is an unforgettable experience — exacting, thorough, startling, and spine-tingling. You are there, along with 1963’s bystanders, witnesses, killers, and victims.

The Kennedy assassination and the early ’60s are history for all of us, but it’s within living memory for many, including me. For those younger than I, the museum makes those days live and breathe. It’s immersive — visitors can stand where Oswald stood — and provocative in the sense of making us do the good work of thinking. It’s very well done, with, bless them, few bells and whistles. The story’s dramatic enough.

The Sixth Floor Museum opened in 1989. It’s a nonprofit museum dedicated to preserving heritage, though the building itself belongs to Dallas County. It’s seven stories, brick, by train tracks, and in a dense commercial neighborhood. It’s in what’s called Commercial Romanesque Revival style, which means squat, brick, and with windows and entrances arched as far as frugality would bear. I’d call it Midwest Germanic. In 1963, it stored and distributed books for Texas’s huge public-school system.

Today, the first floor of the building is used for an efficient, welcoming reception area for visitors and a copious book-and-souvenir shop. The Sixth Floor Museum gets about 450,000 visitors a year. With my ticket, I headed directly to the sixth floor and a leap into the past.

It was a tense as well as cheery trip to Texas. Kennedy and his Texan running mate, Lyndon B. Johnson, carried Texas in 1960, but it was tight. I doubt the Democrats stole it, as many felt then and still feel now. Finding a few extra votes, blown in with the tumbleweeds, is one thing. In 1948, LBJ’s team manufactured an epic 20,000 votes over a week to win a Senate primary by a margin of 87, hence his nickname “Landslide Lyndon.” That took ingenuity and high-steppin’ chutzpah.

Could Texas Democrats have found 60,000 in 1960, in a few short hours? Let’s call it a close call. Anyway, in Daley’s Chicago, it wasn’t Christmas that came early but the resurrection of the Democratic dead, who went not to eternal paradise but to their assigned precinct. It suffices to say, JFK got into the White House by the skin of his glamorously gleaming teeth.

In the 1961 special election to replace LBJ in the U.S. Senate, a college professor and, worse still, a Republican, John Tower, won. It was the first time Texas had picked a Republican for a statewide office since Reconstruction. In 1962, John Connally, an establishment Democrat, narrowly beat a liberal in the primary for governor. His Republican opponent in November ran well, but Connally won. Ike had carried Texas twice, in 1952 and 1956. In 1960, no city in America gave Dick Nixon, who had been Ike’s VP, a bigger vote than Dallas. By 1963, dozens of chapters of the anti-communist John Birch Society were in Dallas.

So JFK had fences to mend to prevent a stampede from trampling his chances in 1964. His Texas visit, with Jackie by his side, stopped in San Antonio, Houston, Fort Worth, and then Dallas. Crowds were big and friendly. Presidential visits in those days were huge. Tens of thousands lined his route from Love Field in Dallas through downtown.

When I got to the sixth floor, I was gratified to see people closely studying the museum galleries on the zeitgeist, characters, and events in the early ’60s. Americans want good history, which young people don’t get in schools and our colleges. They get trash, baby talk, propaganda, and lies, and many people know it. It’s fake history.

The museum is a combination of text-driven wall panels, artifacts, photographs, video, and mood-setting atmospherics such as piles of boxes evoking what was, in 1963, a space packed with stored books.

At the museum, people learn about the 1960 election, the civil-rights movement in the early ’60s, the Cold War, the Space Race with the Soviets, and the early moves toward what would become the catastrophic Great Society. I’d quibble, here and there, in part from hindsight but also from understanding what the Kennedys and their bright young things were, then and there. “Camelot” — not the musical but the mood — was an animated meringue and Harvard hubris at its worst.

The material at the museum is serious. People want to know. Those days were fraught. Visitors want context, and the museum delivers it.

The Kennedy party arrived at Love Field, still an urban airport, from Fort Worth on Friday morning. Kennedy, Mrs. Kennedy in her blushing pink Chanel knockoff suit and hat, though some call it raspberry, and Governor Connelly and his wife, Nellie, rode in the 1961 Lincoln Continental designed and built by Ford as a presidential parade car. Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, rode in a car in front.

The museum doesn’t do a minute-by-minute account, but it’s close to it. During the Baby Boom, every precious moment counted. Most households owned a home-movie camera, and it seemed that everyone had a camera for snapping photographs.

Visitors feel they’re there, watching the parade, seeing Kennedy’s day unfold and abruptly end, in part because the photographs and home movies were shot in a vernacular, everyman style, with no aesthetic stunts. They’re matter-of-fact and immediate. No single event has been so photographed.

The turn on Elm Street past the School Book Depository by Dealey Plaza, a park, was near the end of the parade route. “Mr. President, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you,” gushed Mrs. Connelly. Seconds later, gunfire filled the space with booms, or what sounded like fireworks.

The museum owns the rights to the famous — and notorious — Zapruder film, shot by Abraham Zapruder, the 58-year-old owner of Jennifer Juniors, a dressmaker with an office nearby. Zapruder, a Democrat, was thrilled by the Kennedy visit. He stood on a four-foot concrete abutment on Dealey Plaza. He had vertigo, so his secretary steadied him by the ankles.

Zapruder later said he immediately knew that Kennedy was killed. “His head exploded like a firecracker.” The museum has stills from the film, which the Warren Commission and subsequent investigations analyzed. I didn’t know that the film wasn’t publicly seen until years later.

It took only a couple of minutes for bystanders on the ground to point to the sixth-floor window. They’d heard the shots and seen the rifle sticking from the window. It took less than an hour for police to find the sniper’s nest, made from boxes of books, and three spent shells. There, Oswald fired his new Italian-made Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, drawing a bead on Kennedy with a four-power scope. Oswald worked at the book depository — a quick roll call of staff found him missing. About 90 minutes after the shooting, cops found the rifle tucked between boxes of books. Later, it was traced to Oswald. His fingerprints were on it.

The window out of which Oswald shot is there. Visitors can stand where he stood. There’s no line and no barriers. A video monitor at waist height shows a mock-up view of the motorcade turning from Houston Street onto Elm Street, past part of Dealey Plaza, and then to the exact spots where the motorcade was attacked. For me, it was a chilling moment.

The museum invites visitors to absorb impressions and ambiance or to go deep. A panel on the rifle and ballistics is for the detail-divers. Wall panels and small gallery niches explore the pandemonium that followed the blasts, the race to Parkland Hospital, and the announcement 45 minutes after the shots that Kennedy was dead. Video clips of Oswald’s on-screen, matter-of-fact denial are unearthly.

Minutes after firing, Oswald slipped from the building and fled. During a frantic, citywide manhunt, he killed a cop before sneaking into a movie theater. Cry of Battle, a new movie with Van Heflin and Rita Moreno about the wartime occupation of the Philippines by Japan, was playing. Alerted that a gate-crasher was there, the box-office cashier called the police. After a scuffle, Oswald was nabbed.

There’s a panel on conspiracy theories. It lists a dozen or so with a succinct, factual, judgment-free paragraph on each. There’s a Castro conspiracy as well as an anti-Castro conspiracy, others blaming the New Orleans Mob, the Dallas Mob, or the generic Mob, the CIA, or the vast right-wing conspiracy that was then barely out of “Happy Days” mode. LBJ? Would he have killed for power? He mused in 1960 that a quarter of presidents died in office. I think the museum staff is pummeled by advocates of one narrative or another, each pushing for place to side with them.

Clearly, the museum can’t. It takes the “just the facts, ma’am” approach while subtly acknowledging black holes such as the pristine bullet, which tore through Kennedy, Connally, and the limo dashboard with nary a ding. There’s plenty of strange coincidences in the Kennedy killing and the Kennedy story. Oswald might have been a zilch, but not every zilch in Texas defected to the USSR, as he did. Mafia honchos and the Kennedys were tight as ticks, from Papa Joe Kennedy’s bootlegger days to Jack’s and Bobby’s Rat Pack and mobster buds.

I think it’s difficult for people to believe that someone as inconsequential as Oswald could or would kill someone as consequential as the president. That said, assassins aren’t often heavyweight pols like Brutus or stage stars like Booth. Leon Czolgosz, Gavrilo Princip, and Nathuram Godse aren’t household names — assassins of President McKinley, Archduke Ferdinand, and Gandhi, respectively.

History’s made of flukes. I didn’t know that Oswald and his Russian wife, Marina, were separated. The night before the shooting, he’d visited her in Fort Worth to try to win her back. She declined. He left his wedding ring with her. It’s on display in the museum. Had she said yes, would he have shot Kennedy? We don’t know.

Oswald, in one of his few places in the sun, gave what became the Black Power salute, which he had learned in Moscow.

Hours later, a Dallas detective, Jim Leavelle, escorted Oswald from the Dallas police department to the city jail. “Lee, if anybody shoots at you, I hope they’re as good a shot as you are, that they’ll hit you instead of me,” Leavelle quipped, cowboy-hat-clad, in a jaunty suit, and handcuffed to Oswald. “There ain’t going to be anybody shooting at me,” Oswald said, chortling. “You’re just being melodramatic.” Seconds later, he met Jack Ruby, briefly. Leavelle’s suit is on display, juxtaposed against the photograph of Oswald’s execution.

I didn’t know that Ruby was never convicted of killing Oswald. A murder trial in 1964 found him guilty, and he did indeed get the death penalty, but an appeals court reversed the conviction. “You rat bastard, you shot the president,” Ruby seems to have shouted as he pumped bullets into Oswald. Ruby’s one sleazy character, slathered in sleazy activities with a cast of sleazy friends. He was never retried and died in 1967, not of cancer, which he had, but of a sudden embolism.

On view is the FBI’s 3-D mock-up of the crime scene, with human-scale models of the buildings and the trajectory of the bullets in red string going from the sixth floor to the Kennedy car. Wall panels describe the Warren Commission’s work and the 1970s congressional investigations of the Kennedy murder as well as the Martin Luther King Jr. killing in 1968. A House committee found that a second shooter firing from the infamous grassy knoll was most likely involved in JFK’s assassination.

It seems we’ll never see a consensus. RFK Jr., running for president today, believes that the murder was a CIA affair propelled by JFK’s wish to split the agency.

The Sixth Floor Museum still, 60 years on, lives in a locale that’s queasy if not outright upset about the Kennedy killing. Some national newscasters and pundits blamed right-wing kooks within hours of Kennedy’s death. They and their ilk called Dallas the “City of Hate,” but they’re the hateful bigots. In Dallas, November 22 was a profoundly disturbing day. I love visiting Dallas, which I find a positive, energetic, booming place not to be defined by one event. It’s hard to tag Oswald as a right-wing tool, given that he was an actual communist.

Still, the locals I know are ambivalent. The days of “Why do they keep bringing that up?” are gone. That so many Texans go once to the museum and never again is the nature of the place. It doesn’t change, in part because it doesn’t have much space. The Sixth Floor Museum occupies the seventh floor, where I saw a very good temporary exhibition on JFK’s visit to San Antonio, Houston, and Fort Worth on the two days prior to coming to Dallas. Kennedy was testing positive themes for his 1964 campaign, speaking on space exploration and what was a robust economy. Crowds were big. It amazes me to see so little security.

What might have been?  The museum’s a tiny bit hagiographic at the end, but the interpretation, soon to be redone, is mostly from 1989. The Vietnam War would have happened, Kennedy hands were already in place, and the Diem murder and coup in Saigon in early November 1963 were a done deal, White House–delivered. The Goldwater debacle, race riots, and student upheavals were a roast, forked-and-done, ready for the table. LBJ couldn’t stop it, and he was a heavy hitter.

The museum wants to co-develop and host more with temporary loan shows and long-term loans. The Kennedy Library in Boston and the National Archives in Washington are obvious partners, as well as other presidential sites. The Archives owns a great many artifacts from the day of the assassination and the months and investigations that followed. The Sixth Floor Museum itself owns 95,000 objects and the world’s biggest archive of news coverage of the assassination. It also, and this is critical, wants to do more on citizenship and citizen involvement. Dallas is rich with colleges and universities, as is Texas.

I’m no Kennedy fan. I was the mascot for Connecticut’s “Youth for Nixon” club in 1960 and, at age three, its youngest member. Putting aside his movie-star looks and Hollywood connections, what Kennedy called his “vigga” motivated young people to follow current events and to get involved. Much could be done with this spirit today. Dallas’s Holocaust Museum is across the street, having developed there in part to be near the Sixth Floor Museum. Collaborations with this important museum are on the docket as well.

The Dallas County government used the Sixth Floor Museum building until recently for county business. It has moved, in part because the old depository building is far from modern and needs work. If the Sixth Floor Museum expands within the space, as it should, it will need to do new fundraising to pay for it. Now, almost all its income comes from admissions.

I think it’s an exceptionally well presented and thoughtful museum.