On the Assassination of JFK

On the Assassination of JFK

By Cameron Byerly

July 4, 2016

I guarded lives for several years.

More accurately, I was a lifeguard. I managed chlorine levels and provided an atmosphere of safety. The hours often burned, so I would cool in the water. And no matter how many years I’d do this, or how refreshing the result, I would think the same words every time the water rose over my chest.

‘Why would I do this to myself?’

The question has become a close friend. Self-inflicted discomfort always summons this same reaction. In the specific case of jumping in a pool, the question of ‘why’ has an easy answer. In moments of pure reaction, when all thought is the doctor’s needle in the arm, these words are a knee-jerk reaction to life’s many mallets.

So when watching the footage of John F. Kennedy’s assassination again during my sunny vacation days, I have to properly answer this question. Something so horrid warrants a hefty excuse.

JFK’s death was a captivating historic moment on all fronts, from the political, to the personal, even the conspiratorial. The human factor is primary to my own fascination, along with a simple catalyst: The assassination of John F. Kennedy was filmed. The most powerful leader on Earth was reduced to a desecrated corpse in the back of a Lincoln. More astonishing is the fact that anyone with an internet connection can access the footage in seconds, shot so clearly it seems an arms length away. Millions already have.

I can offer a simple reason to watch; because you can. To the unconvinced; I encourage the discomfort all the same. Watching the footage is to expose oneself to the purest element of chaos, in its cruelest form. This is a reversal of fortune with no transition, proof that the American President is as susceptible to the anarchy of bullets as anyone.

Watching the film, as JFK is driven forward, today’s eyes are fixed on him in anticipation of the inevitable. Yet by the time the footage has faded to black, I cannot imagine anyone still watching the man, and not staring, transfixed, at the woman in pink. Her name is Jacqueline Kennedy, and her movements are far more striking than her husband's. With Jacqueline, the film is more than just a death.

The details of the tragedy are secondary to the importance of the footage. The date, 1962, is not easily recalled. The model car has come to trivalry, the circumstances of his campaigning ignored, and most everything else dismissed to a contemporary audience. The event itself is a capsule, and no amount of explanation changes the mechanics of what is seen. When the famed Zapruder Film is put to the monitor today, there is only a husband and wife, waving in the back of an open car.

When the president comes into frame, he seems to cough into his fist, and leans forward. His wife leans towards him, with her arm around his shoulders. Visually, they seem to be confiding in each other. Only through subsequent reports can one know the man had already been shot through the chest, his posture is so subtly slouched.

With no warning, the man’s temple explodes into a fist-sized patty of red and white. His body flops horribly. The President is dead. But his empress in pink sits up, pushes off her husband’s shoulder, and stretches back across the car trunk. Testimonials confirm that Jacqueline was reaching to grab a chunk of her husband's brain, before being motioned back into the seat by a man following the car on foot. She had this same brain tissue in her hand for hours, and in her shock, she would not remember reaching for it when questioned later. Reports state that she was grabbing the piece to put her husband together again.

Before the bullet, she was First Lady, a figure of adoration and grace worldwide. She had given speeches to millions and attended dinners of prestige and importance. She held more than just influence over the world’s most powerful leader. She wore the most beautiful dresses and jewelry. She was a figure, a celebrity, a power, but a person as well. In the next moment, she was splattered in her husband's blood, reaching to grab a piece of her husband to correct his death.

Articulating these details may suggest a perverse fascination with the grotesque elements of the tragedy. But as Mrs. Kennedy has passed on, and the footage has not, the disquieting elements are integral to understanding the personal reality of an increasingly distant historic moment. These graphic details may address the physical death of JFK, but more so they reveal the primeval demise of Jacqueline Kennedy.

The footage moves the First Lady towards her tragedy as smoothly as her limoscene. She has been moving towards that moment, at the same speed, her entire life. Never for her was a second spent not a second closer to that bullet.

The modern voyeur has the ability to rewind the footage and return her to former prestige. One only needs to press play to repeat the fall from grace. This makes the primary change of interest not the president, from life to death, or even the pitiable Mrs. Kennedy, from royalty to animalism, but the viewer. There is a positive benefit through watching, and a positive in the ability to watch.

The choice to watch this film encapsulates the power of free internet as nothing else can. How can the aura of infallibility exist in our leaders when such raw evidence proves otherwise? What a privilege; what a curse. Watching the world’s most powerful man being killed is eclipsed only by watching the desperate stretch of the world’s most powerful woman.

But why would you do this to yourself?

When in need of a reality check, or of appreciating the moments of life that can never come back, please visit this video. When considering the power that the internet provides the modern man in a free society, rather than being tucked behind firewalls or censors, revisit this video. Because in the days of JFK, men made war, and women were left to pick up the pieces. Here we see who requires our attention, and who deserves our pity.

The reminder that everything can go wrong so quickly helped me guard lives more carefully. And perhaps, if seen this way, others can also appreciate the times before tragedies… or at the very least the power, the modern privilege, to sit in a room and watch a president die for free. We can do what Jacqueline could not; with the drag of a mouse, we can reverse the footage, and put the man, and his wife, together again.

"I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure." - Oliver Sacks