11-17-13
The City With a Death Wish in Its Eye
Roundup: Talking About Historytags: JFK, Lee Harvey Oswald, Dallas, JFK assassination, Kennedys
James McAuley is a Marshall scholar studying history at the University of Oxford.
FOR 50 years, Dallas has done its best to avoid coming to terms with the one event that made it famous: the assassination of John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. That’s because, for the self-styled “Big D,” grappling with the assassination means reckoning with its own legacy as the “city of hate,” the city that willed the death of the president.
It will miss yet another opportunity this year. On Nov. 22 the city, anticipating an international spotlight, will host an official commemoration ceremony. Dallas being Dallas, it will be quite the show: a jet flyover, a performance from the Naval Academy Men’s Glee Club and remarks from the historian David McCullough on Kennedy’s legacy.
But once again, spectacle is likely to trump substance: not one word will be said at this event about what exactly the city was in 1963, when the president arrived in what he called, just moments before his death, “nut country.”...
comments powered by Disqus
News
- How the US Government Used Comics to Inform Americans About the Holocaust
- Virginia's Governor Took Away the Most Important Piece of Protest Art in the Country. What Should He Have Done?
- Congressional Commission Unveils Proposal to Rename Bases Honoring Confederates
- The Forgotten School Gun Massacre in Stockton, CA
- An Exclusive Look at the New WWI Memorial