Thursday, November 22, 2007

Kennedy and the Lone Gunman

Everyone has seen the Zapruder film of the Kennedy Assassination. But what if the film captures shot two and three, but not the very first one fired at the presidential motorcade? An opinion piece in the NYT argues this:

And why has it taken so long to realize that the assassination and the Zapruder film are not one and the same? Part of the answer lies in the power of the film itself. As the critic Richard B. Woodward wrote in The Times in 2003, the assassination became “fused with one representation, so much so that Kennedy’s death is virtually unimaginable without Zapruder’s film.” To that, one has to add the element of distraction. The Warren Commission did not pursue its May 1964 insight because it was fixated not on the shot that missed but on the ones that killed the president.

If this belated revelation changes nothing from one perspective — Oswald still did it — it simultaneously changes everything, if only because it disrupts the state of mind of everyone who has ever been transfixed by the Zapruder film. The film, we realize, does not depict an assassination about to commence. It shows one that had already started.


That brings back memories of a hotel lobby in Washington where the hotel staff ordered a group of people (including me) back to their rooms when a (slightly drunk) friend of mine loudly insisted that Bell Helicopter was involved in the the JFK assissination.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Congratulations. You're friend has seen JFK.