The closeness of things applies to the whole Dealey Plaza setting. Having grown up with the iconic photos and 8 mm home movies of the assassination, I had developed a second-hand sense of the size of the geographical space within which those horrible events took place. But when I was actually in Dallas many years later, I was quite surpried at how small the actual dimensions of the real place are. How small the plaza is, how narrow the streets are, how close the overpass and the "grassy knoll" are, and, most chillingly, how close the Texas School Book Depository Building is to the street. I'm no shooter, but it didn't appear to me that LHO needed to be the greatest shot in the world. The President's car was right there below him.
6 comments:
I wouldn't have thought that image would be so evocative.
Having stood there (in the now-museum), I was shocked at house close the motorcade was.
How much more believable the shots were. . . .
. . . how close. . .
The closeness of things applies to the whole Dealey Plaza setting. Having grown up with the iconic photos and 8 mm home movies of the assassination, I had developed a second-hand sense of the size of the geographical space within which those horrible events took place. But when I was actually in Dallas many years later, I was quite surpried at how small the actual dimensions of the real place are. How small the plaza is, how narrow the streets are, how close the overpass and the "grassy knoll" are, and, most chillingly, how close the Texas School Book Depository Building is to the street. I'm no shooter, but it didn't appear to me that LHO needed to be the greatest shot in the world. The President's car was right there below him.
The fact that it's so ordinary is somehow striking, sort of like Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil."
Oswald didn't shoot anybody and expert marksmen couldn't duplicate those shots with that cheap bolt action rifle. Get real.
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