March 18, 2008
by Mike Palecek
WEATHERFORD, TEXAS - I had hoped to make it to Stephenville tonight, but it's midnight, and I'm about an hour or more short. Stephenville is where there have been a recent rash of UFO sightings.
I'll go outside and smoke a cigarette and look around. It's the best I can do. I'm here UFOs, abduct me.
Thursday night I met with the Dallas-Fort Worth 911 Truth group at Crystal's Pizza.
Daniel and Dale are from Dallas. They are jailers in the Dallas County Jail. I mention the old jail and it being in Dealey Plaza and how some inmates said they saw a shooter in the sixth floor window.
Daniel says it's closed now, but they used to hold hangings on the roof. He says former inmates of the jail and older jailers say it's haunted because of that.
Dale is big and bald and he'll be twenty-one soon. He's from Arizona and his dream would be to get onto the Dallas police force and then become a resource officer in the schools.
This morning I went to Mecca. I don't think being in Bethlehem could be any more awe inspiring than where I was today. Maybe a John Prine concert.
Dealey Plaza. 411 Elm Street.
The first day I walked into kindergarten at Lincoln School, Miss Steele had written all across the blackboard in big fluffy yellow teacher handwriting, President John F. Kennedy.
In third grade, just after lunch, Sister Ellen floated into the classroom on the invisible nun conveyer belt - you couldn't see their feet - and told us the President had been shot and that he was dead.
"Why?" I ask Mike Brown, who is standing on the Grassy Knoll, why he comes here.
"For the truth," says Mike. He is a big, black man wearing black work clothes. He's got a deep voice and he's giving folks the alternative view of history, the op-ed of what they have just heard nearby in the JFK Museum tour.
He has been coming to this place ever since to tell the truth.
What is the truth?
"Everybody ran here," he says, meaning the Grassy Knoll. "You could smell the gunpowder."
He didn't see any shooters when he arrived, but he pulls out a black and white photo of a man in a suit and a white cowboy hat, behind the fence, carrying something under a jacket or cover that Mike says is a rifle.
There is a police officer in the photo. Mike knows him, shows the two together in a recent color photo. The police officer says the man told him he was with the Secret Service and should keep the crowd that was coming up to the fence area away, which the officer then did. The man disappeared.
Mike was thirteen in 1963. He shows a color photo of him in the crowd on Elm Street, a skinny kid in a red and white checkered shirt, wide eyes, leaning forward to see the oncoming motorcade in front of the Dal-Tex building. He later testified in front of the Warren Commission when it came to Dallas.
It's small. Tiny. So much in so little space. It's like finding out WWII actually took place in a closet. The shot from the Grassy Knoll was point-blank. There is an "X" in the middle lane of the road.
The road angles downward. The Grassy Knoll fence is still there. Right there is the overpass where the car disappeared into history with Jackie Kennedy climbing onto the back of the vehicle to retrieve part of her husband's brain.
I walk around to look over. I would be too short to be a shooter, but you realize that the shot was point-blank. It's all just right-there.
The train whistle blows. Behind, there are the tracks, the overpass.
Mike says it's all just as it was then, the fence is the same. He points to the perch where Abraham Zapruder stood with his camera. It's right there, just a few feet away.
This hasn't all been a dream. It's real.
On the back of the fence people have written their names, dedications to the president.
"St. John Hunt was here, son of E. Howard Hunt, 1/13/08."
"JFK, God Bless You."
"George Bush Did It/911 Truth."
(Article Continues Below)
Inside the museum they give you headphones and you go up the elevator to the sixth floor. You walk around the parts of the exhibit listening to the audio tour. You learn about the Kennedy presidency, and also about the mood in Dallas before his visit, during his visit.
You see amateur film of the event, still-photos. The crowds were ten-deep along Main Street.
You look out those windows on the sixth floor, down Houston Street where the motorcade came before turning sharply left. There are people all around the area, taking photos, pointing toward the sixth floor, a group gathered out on the Grassy Knoll.
New carpeting, new shiny displays, but the wooden beams and big steel braces are the same. You can touch them, lean against them, feel them.
It's family history, genealogy. We want to know where we came from. It's not like going to see some World War I battlefield. It's now.
There are people alive now who know the truth, who were there. It's a cold, open case. On the timeline of world history it's still the same day.
It's mostly quiet in the museum because people are walking around with earphones, listening to the audio tour. But it's also quiet from intensity, like folks are walking in to view the body of a close friend. When they actually get there it's perhaps more than they can handle.
I had meant to walk around in the neighborhood behind the depository where Oswald ran or walked to get away, but in the tour I learned that he walked out the front door, took a bus, then a transfer, then a cab, then walked, to get home in the Oak Cliff neighborhood, change clothes, get his gun, then supposedly kill officer J.D. Tippit, then try to hide in the Texas Theater on Jefferson Boulevard, where he was captured by the Dallas police.
Mike points back over the trees to the double McDonalds arches in the distance and says that's where Kennedy was supposed to be going to speak at a luncheon at the Market Hall. He just a few minutes from there.
I ask why Oswald ran. Mike says he didn't run, he just went home, to get his gun. Tippit was supposed to kill him. Oswald was the patsy. Maybe he realized at that moment what was happening to him.
Oswald sounds calm on the earphones saying he didn't kill anybody. You stand there, in the spot, and hear those words, and I can't see myself being that cool.
I get lost leaving the area as a matter of course, go along an overpass and find myself in Oak Cliff.
This is where Oswald lived, where Tippit was shot, where the theatre is. It's now a black neighborhood. I'll bet it was white middle class back then.
I make a wrong turn and almost hit a white car. The woman screams and honk. I mouth "sorry" and head back toward downtown.
Mike says that Tippit was supposed to kill Oswald the patsy and that Ruby had to be called in to clean up the job. But who shot Tippit then. And why?
I can't help but wonder what it would have been like to be Oswald at that time, to be boarding that bus, running, with all this happening around him, walking along a normal city street knowing his life would never be okay ever again.
Well, I go all the way through the downtown along Commerce, finally find Main Street and realize this is the motorcade route and will take me back to Dealey Plaza.
Here it is. I pass the spot where Mike stood in 1963.
Here I go, down the dip.
There is Mike on the Grassy Knoll with another group, pointing up to the Dal-Tex rooftop, where he says one of the shooters was, along with two behind the fence and one more on the sixth floor.
"Not Oswald."
Mike has never left Dealey Plaza. He never will.
I'm exiting soon, with President John F. Kennedy still etched into my brain in flaky yellow chalk.
And then - boom - there I am, on the "X". The knoll is right there. There's the overpass.
I turn right to take 35-E.
In a few moments I pass Market Hall, where Kennedy was supposed to speak at a luncheon, then a few moments later the exit for Love Airfield, where the Kennedy's landed just before noon that day and where they left later in the day with the president's body in a box.
See ya.
- Mike
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Mike Palecek [send him email] is an activist for peace and social justice. He served time in federal prison for civil disobedience and has run for US Congress. He has authored a number of books [click here to view] on behalf of the cause.
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