The long shot
Dallas, Texas
I AM STARING out the window of the sniper’s nest, the vantage point of assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. On that fateful day, November 22, 1963, he aimed his rifle at a man sitting in a car driving past on the street below and shook the world to its very core.
I remember that day well, as an eight-year-old student in Patricia Harvey’s third grade class, another teacher yelling through the classroom window in a voice filled with anguish, “They’ve shot the President!” Classes were immediately dismissed and all students were hurriedly sent home. I remember the hushed voices of my parents, the grainy television newscast playing nonstop in the subsequent days. I remember my mother telling me solemnly, “Remember this day.”
I didn’t understand the riderless horse prancing in the street at the somber televised funeral, a pair of riding boots turned backward in the stirrups. “Did he have a horse? Did he ride horses?” “No,” my mother tried to explain. “It’s symbolic. It’s not really his horse.”
I have always wanted to see the exact place where the assassination happened, and today I finally have a DFW layover that gets into Dallas early enough to visit the Sixth Floor Museum in Dealey Plaza. I walk on the infamous grassy knoll. It is so small, and so close to the street. I see the big white X painted on the road, marking the exact spot where the assassin’s bullet smashed into the head of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the young, charismatic 35th president of the United States. Cars drive over the painted X, seemingly oblivious to the history beneath their wheels.
The museum, on the sixth floor of the former School Book Depository, is crammed with artifacts, photographs, posterboards, timelines, videos. I am a bit overwhelmed, even though there is nothing new here, nothing I haven’t already read or watched or heard about. Walking up to the sniper’s roost, I look out the window. Oswald crouched here in wait. His first shot is believed to have missed Kennedy, hitting the traffic signal hanging on cables over the street, as it still does today, silently blinking green, yellow, red.
Dealey Plaza is small. All these years I thought it was big, a sizable open space, a large clearing amid office buildings and shops, but today I learn Oswald, leaning out the upper window on the sixth floor of a brick building, was less than 300 feet away from his intended target, the head of the president of the United States. He was so close. It is absolutely chilling to see how close.
From that window, even I could have accurately fired a shot 300 feet.
I have been in that room as well looking out that open window and I agree with you, Ann, that the shot was easy enough to make from that vantage point. Until you see it, it’s difficult to imagine.
I could’ve thrown a ROCK out that window and hit Kennedy.