By MANNY FERNANDEZ
Published: November 22, 2013
DALLAS — The weather was gray, frigid and windy Friday amid extraordinarily tight security as people arrived at Dealey Plaza to mark the assassination of President John F. Kennedy 50 years ago.
Multimedia
Related
In Kennedy’s Death, a Turning Point for a Nation Already Torn(November 22, 2013)
‘Kennedy Has Been Shot’: Memories From Nov. 22, 1963(November 22, 2013)
Once at Kennedy’s Side, Now at One Another’s (November 22, 2013)
Related in Opinion
Op-Ed Contributor: Kennedy's Legacy of Inspiration (November 22, 2013)
Michael Stravato for The New York Times
People waited for the start of a ceremony commemorating the death of President John F. Kennedy in Dealey Plaza on Friday in Dallas.
As a slide show of photographs of Kennedy was displayed on large screens, workers prepared a stage in the center of the downtown plaza and erected a large portrait of the president as a backdrop. Surrounding streets were cordoned off by fences and patrolled by police officers on foot and in vehicles.
The ceremony, beneath the gaze of the sixth-floor corner window of the former Texas School Book Depository, was scheduled to begin at 11:30 a.m. Dallas time, with plans for church bells to ring throughout the city.
The historian David McCullough will read excerpts from Kennedy’s speeches, jets from a Texas unit of the nonprofit Commemorative Air Force will pass overhead in the missing-man formation, and a moment of silence will occur at 12:30 p.m., when the first shot rang out 50 years ago as the president’s motorcade headed to a lunch at the Dallas Trade Mart.
The ceremony is one of a number of observances scheduled across the nation Friday, from a musical tribute at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston to a memorial mass at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington. The Texas Theater, where Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested, is scheduled to screen part of “War Is Hell,” the movie that was showing when Oswald sneaked in.
One of the guests at Friday’s ceremony in Dallas, Robert Connor, 57, was a second-grade student at a Catholic school in Birmingham, Mich, in 1963. “When the announcement was made over the P.A.,” he said, “everybody was stunned, and all the kids started crying.”
Mr. Connor now works for a paper company in Dallas and lives in the nearby suburb of Plano. He was surprised to learn that his online request for two tickets to the observance at Dealey Plaza had been accepted. On Friday morning, he and his wife, bundled up in winter gear, found a spot on the grass in the center of the plaza in front of a screen that was playing old news footage of a Kennedy speech.
“It’s like kind of reliving things all over again,” Mr. Connor said. “It’s similar to 9/11. Don’t forget what took place here.”
Police officers did criminal background checks on each of the 5,000 guests who received tickets. Those without tickets or credentials could not get close to the area Friday morning.
A group of researcher and academics critical of the Warren Commission that has organized a moment of silence at the grassy knoll on this date every year since 1964 was prevented from gathering at the site while the ceremony was being held. They said they would instead meet at a nearby location.
Never before has Dallas commemorated the assassination with such a large, costly event.
Led by Mayor Michael S. Rawlings, a committee of 25 civic and religious leaders raised about $3 million in private donations and spent months planning and organizing the event. The group distributed tickets to the public using a computer-generated lottery program. Video screens have been set up at three nearby locations for those without tickets.
“We haven’t done anything of this scale,” Mr. Rawlings said. “I do think it’s right to take a moment out and say thank you to President Kennedy. He was heading to a place, for a luncheon, where a lot of city leaders were going to be there to thank him and applaud him, and he never got there. So this is our way of doing it 50 years later.”
In the past, the city has avoided getting involved in events marking Kennedy’s assassination, and there was a strong push in the 1970s to demolish the red-brick School Book Depository building, which many considered an ugly monument to the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.
“There was widespread belief that if you just demolished the damn thing you wouldn’t have to talk about it anymore, but saner heads prevailed,” said Hugh Aynesworth, 82, who covered the assassination and its aftermath as a reporter for The Dallas Morning News.
- 1
- 2
No comments:
Post a Comment