Dedicated to Vincent Bugliosi

At 12:29 and approximately 45 seconds on November 22, 1963, a dark blue limousine turned onto Elm Street. If everything went according to plan, it would head under a triple overpass and eventually find its way to Dallas’ Trade Mart, where President John F. Kennedy was scheduled to make a speech. The man sat rigidly, exposed in the open back seat, and thoroughly enjoyed himself. The ride had been quite pleasant. He had already stopped once for a group of children who had help up a sign reading, “MR. PRESIDENT PLEASE STOP AND SHAKE OUR HANDS” and he had stopped again for another group of children accompanied by a nun. Kennedy, in a generously Catholic moment, got out of the car and held her tight, like he meant it, tears welling up in his eyes. Everyone had thought it was going to rain that day, but instead the President of the United States rode in the open and embraced the people of these United States, children and nuns alike. Everyone was happy.

Kennedy was the happiest of all. He toyed with a bottle of prescription pills in his right front pocket. He’d taken quite a few in the Texas Hotel back at Fort Worth, while his wife was still getting ready, and that had done a great deal to get him through the ride, but more importantly, there were still some pills left in the bottle. Kennedy glowed. He sat up in his elevated back seat and waved to everyone and looked at everyone, particularly the children. Weeks later, children who had been on directly opposite sides of the street attested that Kennedy had looked them directly in the eyes, with a look of charming despair and profound joy, promising through his eyes that no matter how many communists were threatening to kill them, no matter how many cookies their mothers wouldn’t give them, somehow everything would be okay. It’s as if the man knew what was going to happen and welcomed it, casting his joy out and over the people who had lined up for hours just to see the President. It is hard to overstate how beautiful a day it was and would continue to be. Everything came of its own accord, like a flower destined to bloom.

The President’s Secret Service was having an entirely different sort of day. While Kennedy was as happy and high as a kite, waving at children and fondling nuns, the SS operated furtively behind the scenes so that the daily work of the nation could remain private, leaving only the tearful, joyous incarnation of democracy inevitably processing through the streets of Dallas. To make sure that this incarnation remained inevitable and constant, the SS prepared for every contingency, murdering thousands and engaging in the kind of gentle fear mongering which could sway entire political movements. Their job was not so much to protect the body of the President as it was to protect the idea of the President, whatever that might be at the time. At any point in history, the SS fought against, cooperated with, or infiltrated the various organizations aligned against the Presidency. Typically only one or two of these forces were active threats at any given time, but they were still active threats. The SS had taught itself how to keep these threats from kidnapping, killing, extorting, or otherwise shaming the Presidency at any given time. It was miserable, but they did it.

Today wasn’t all that different. It was simply too much more of the same. It was as if every threat to the President had assembled in Dallas, sometimes without even knowing that the President would be there or even that they were threats to Him. And it wasn’t just the threats that came together, but everything surrounding the President and America and History. It wasn’t just the mafia; it was the pope as well. It wasn’t just a few disgruntled Cubans; it included the literary aspirations of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. It wasn’t Oswald, but also Johnson, and the voyeurs who wanted to see a man die and the atmosphere of hope and dread surrounding a man whose charisma had inspired massive crowds to dimly compare him to the likes of King Arthur. The historical facts betray a confluence of history, and in that confluence lies a metaphysical necessity. John F. Kennedy needed to die, because of the combination of the motivations, actions, hopes, and ontologies of the assorted historical imperatives surrounding him and his era. It seems at times that JFK didn’t simply die because of a few bullets, but instead because of Us and everything We are. Because of Us and for Us and with Us and in Us. It’s as if he were Us, and on that day We All Died Together, for reasons that only get murkier with time and analysis.

The SS was only vaguely aware of how all the different pieces fit together, which is why they played more a part in Kennedy’s assassination than they would ever care to admit. The main thing they knew was that Dallas was dangerous territory. The city leaned to the right, and within the city lay certain groups which had gone over the edge into radicalism. A month prior to the parade, Adlai Stevenson had given a speech on diplomacy to a raving crowd only to have them spit on him and beat him with picket signs. “You probably have long meaningful conversations with the fucking commies, dontcha?” members of the crowd shouted. “Over red wine! As you watch pornographic European art films! And mourn your sensitivity in a callous world, dontcha Mr. Steeeeevenson!” He emerged with two fractured ribs and a broken nose. When word got out that Kennedy would be coming to Dallas, the SS monitored all the AM stations, newspapers, and children’s television programming to investigate suspicious behavior. They discovered a number of full-page advertisements from an unknown organization listing the various grievances of the Kennedy administration, in a sad imitation of the Declaration of Independence, and assumed the worst.

The SS had already planned for Kennedy’s assassination a thousand times over. They kidnapped a series of homeless men, of various shapes and sizes, and planted them in cars, behind podiums, and on various floors of office buildings, for practice. One homeless man drove a car down an abandoned road in the middle of the forest while another homeless man sat tied to the open back seat, while SS snipers posted in trees tried to take out the “President” and other SS agents tried to stop them. If the homeless men were killed, the agents pretended to rage and grieve, and if the men got away, the snipers pretended to shoot themselves in the head in despair. They were ready.

[. . .]

they drove out all the whores and pimps and replaced them with cross-dressing officers who were sold for the highest prices by their elaborately adorned sergeants. A few of these cops had the time of their lives and a few extra bucks, but the rest

[. . .]

posted undercover cops in the coffee shops and bookstores

[. . .]

it turned out that the owners and denizens of strip clubs were strangely patriotic. Jack Ruby, owner of a local strip club, was such good friends with the police that he would frequently make them sandwiches.

[. . .]

There were at least fifteen separate assassination attempts that day which were either

[. . .]

Lyndon B Johnson’s assassination attempt

[. . .]

This would completely rip the heart out of our good old southern boys. The Democratic Party would have lost all its voters except for the frustrated artists, the middle-managers, and the rich kids who felt guilty about all the wealth they had inherited from their staunchly conservative fathers. I didn’t want that. I mean, don’t get me wrong, Kennedy would've been a great President, but that’s the thing . . . great leaders either bring their countries to greatness or destroy them. And I didn't want to take that chance.”

To carry out his intentions, Johnson had planned to sit in the front seat of Kennedy’s limousine. He knew that the President always sat on an elevated seat to show himself off to the crowds and that underneath this seat was a snub-nosed revolver, in case the President should ever need to make use of it. Oftentimes, the President would sit in the White House garage for hours at a time, reaching underneath his seat and pulling out the revolver at a moment’s notice, shouting, “Not this time, Khrushchev!” before shooting at and sometimes missing one of his SS guards. Johnson’s plan was to turn around in his front seat, point out some child Kennedy had forgotten to smile at (or maybe a nun), pull out the gun while Kennedy wasn’t looking, and shoot the President square in the forehead. Since Johnson was originally from Texas, he expected to get away from the event without having to suffer any criminal charges. So long as the President wasn’t seen to suffer, Johnson told himself, nobody in America would really care whether he lived or died.

[. . .]

Zapruder, in his desire to produce the highest-quality snuff films available to man, had decided to install a rifle in his camera that would assassinate the President for all America to see – the dreams of every American boy brought to life on celluloid. He planned on interposing some pornographic material to make it more titillating, but the President’s murder would be the main feature.

[. . .]

There is the case of a young seminarian who, according to wiretaps, wanted to harvest Kennedy’s skull for dark sexual rituals in the forest with a man who was constantly on fire. No one’s quite sure where the seminarian came from, where he was going, or where he actually went.

[. . .]

The pope wanted the President dead because he was afraid that Kennedy, desperate for the press' attention and pity, would tearfully reveal that he'd been raped numerously and violently by a pack of undomesticated Franciscans at the age of eleven, an event which probably had some bearing on his frequent marital infidelities. Although the pope wasn't concerned about the actual rape -- everyone knew that monks were fucked up to begin with -- he was concerned about the revelation that a practicing, admired Catholic would ever cheat on his wife. It could sully the institution of marriage, he thought. So JFK had to die.

And then there was Arthur Schlesinger Jr. He was currently serving on Kennedy’s staff and compiling material for an eventual biography. The problem was that the book was getting too long and he wanted a snappy ending, so he got

[. . .]

It is well known that Kennedy was planning on killing himself that day, and while some prefer to treat this as an additional assassination attempt, I prefer to treat it as just another facet of the day. Because if Kennedy’s suicide attempt were treated as an assassination, Kennedy could’ve been tried for treason and perhaps executed for attempting to murder the President. Whatever the case, he planned on using the revolver taped to the bottom of his seat, the same one that Johnson had planned on using to blow Kennedy’s brains out. Ideally, Kennedy would have had this seat elevated to ten feet in the air, so that everyone could see him draped in magnificent robes, but the SS insisted that this would be too dangerous a perch because it made the President too visible and would probably be too unstable to sit on for any extended period of time. “That is entirely the fucking point,” Kennedy said. “But what about the overpass? You’ll probably hit it.” But the President would only repeat, “That is entirely the fucking point,” as he constantly tied and untied his shoes. He planned to flail about on top of the perch for as long as he could, maybe firing off the gun for the hell of it, until they got to the overpass. Then he would shout to make sure everyone could hear, “Oh, no! The bridge is too low and I am too high! What am I going to do?” Then he would shoot himself in front of the crowd, as if it were his only remaining option. Unfortunately, the seat was only elevated a few inches so that the crowd could get a better view of Kennedy’s head. Any higher was deemed too dangerous, but this didn’t stop Kennedy from thinking he might still be able to carry it out. The driver reports that Kennedy’s last words were a rehearsal of his suicide bit. “The bridge is too low, and I am too high,” he mumbled to himself. “The bridge is too low, and I am too high.”

[. . .]

The most they ever found out about Oswald was that his wife was Russian (which should’ve been a clue all along) and that he liked to pretend in his living room that he was hijacking a plane. He’d point his gun-shaped fingers at the TV and say in his best John Wayne imitation, “Now you’re gonna have to turn this plane around.”

[. . .]

The original plan, once Oswald was in custody, was to beat him to death

[. . .]

When the police asked Jack Ruby for a confession, all he could give was the following testimony:

“I went home, watched television, and cried a great deal . . . It grieved me that this nut Oswald had done such a thing . . . It hadn’t occurred to me to shoot Oswald at the time. I just kinda walked in and there he was and I had a gun and it all fell together . . . I mean, I’m proud I’m a Jew and I wanted to show them what a Jew could do . . . I’m proud of the city of Dallas, I think it’s the greatest city in the world, particularly when it comes to racial problems . . . I wanted to be something . . . something better than anyone else.”

The officer questioning Ruby talked about contradictory testimony, or maybe he had just started talking philosophically. Whatever the case, Jack wasn’t listening, and the last thing he heard was the question, “How do you explain that?”

“I don’t explain that,” he said.

[. . .]