Birthday II: Sixth Floor Museum

 

For my birthday celebration Little One came over on Saturday and she, the Mrs, and I drove down to Dallas. After five years in Texas I was finally going to visit the Sixth Floor Museum in Dealey Plaza. The museum resides in what was once known as the Texas School Book Depository, where Lee Harvey Oswald worked 63 years ago, and on the sixth floor he fired the lethal rifle shots that killed President John F. Kennedy.

About fifteen years ago I did a huge deep dive into the JFK assassination. Before that I had seen the Oliver Stone film in the theaters, and over one Memorial Day weekend five or six years later analyzed the book Six Seconds in Dallas by Josiah Thompson. Over a two-year period around 2009 / 2010 I put away a dozen books on the event. The most convincing ones I found were Case Closed  by Gerald Posner and the magnum opus 1,650-page Reclaiming History by prosecutor-turned-researcher Vincent Bugliosi (I did not read all 1,650 pages).

I believe with about 95 percent certainty that Oswald was the lone gunman. However, all those connections he had – with the military, the CIA, the mafia, the left-wing, the Soviet Union – seem almost beyond coincident and its understandable why so many fall down this tantalizingly intriguing conspiracy rabbit hole.

Here are some pics (of the 135 I took!) from my visit to the museum:

This is a scale model of Dealey Plaza used by the FBI during the initial investigation back in 1963. Forget the exact scale, but it was something like 1 inch = 3 feet. The diorama was huge, maybe 10 feet by 10 feet by 6 feet in height.

Me looking at the Sniper's Perch, that sunlit corner twelve or fifteen feet beyond the glass partition, where Oswald fired the shots from the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle.

Took this pic because I have never seen it anywhere else: the interior of the 1961 Lincoln Continental which drove JFK, Jackie, Governor Connelly and his wife, and two secret service men on that terrible day. You can sort of see how the jump seats in the middle, which look folded up, are slightly lower and more centered, than the rear seat in which JFK sat. 

There were lots of memorabilia for JFK, Oswald, and Ruby. For some odd reason I found these brass knuckles and pistol holster, found in Ruby's car after killing Oswald, interesting. He really was a rough fellow, mob connections and strip club ownership and all.

Since the sixth floor Sniper's Perch was closed off by a glass partition, you had to go up to the seventh floor to look out for the approximate view Oswald would have had. It's not as far as you'd think. There are five vehicles following the curve on the right side, Elm Street. The middle vehicle just passed the X mark where JFK suffered the fatal head shot.

Directly outside the Texas School Book Depository, renamed the Dallas County Administrative Building many decades now. Oswald fired from the square window six stories up from ground level on the far right.

The famous Grassy Knoll. The fence, where there may or may not have been another shooter, has been replaced several times in the past 63 years, but always with a replica for historical reasons. The knoll itself is a slight incline of about 20 degrees, and it's about sixty or seventy feet from the sidewalk on Elm to the wooden fence.

Hopper posing at the wooden fence, smiling at photographer Little One after scouring the ground for any evidence which might have been overlooked of a second gunman.

The spot in the middle of Elm Street where JFK received the fatal wound.