Assassin Nation

The Zapruder Film on a Nonstop Loop

By Steve Watkins

ADVANCE EDITOR

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There’s no place for this kind of violence in America. This isn’t who we are. It’s time to turn down the rhetoric.

That’s what they’ve been saying for the past two years, ever since a lucky, last-second turn of his head on Saturday, July 13, 2024 meant that Donald Trump only suffered the mild disturbance of a few stratum corneum cells on the top edge of his right ear instead of being made dead by a bullet from a hastily aimed AR15-style rifle, a curiously close 400 feet away at a campaign rally in Butler, PA. On the one hand, what extraordinary marksmanship for the shooter, a 20-year-old boy, to come that near to taking out the Insurrectionist in Chief—after being interrupted by a nosy cop who the kid had to chase away before repositioning himself in a prone firing position on top of a warehouse with a clear line of sight on the former president. On the other hand, how good a shot could he have been really when the community college grad and nursing home kitchen aide (with his choice of more than a dozen guns at home) also hit three MAGA rallygoers on the risers behind Trump, killing one of them outright, seriously wounding the other two, and leaving all their poor families devastated.

I had to throw in that last line, of course, because it’s de rigueur to acknowledge and express sympathy for the innocent victims in these shootings. Once that’s out of the way, though—after you make a treacly show of kissing the helmet of the firefighter who was killed at your political rally—you get a free pass to not utter a single word about gun violence in America, but instead go on an hour-and-a-half-long rant, with a maxi pad taped to the side of your head, about “Crazy Nancy,” “the late, great Hannibal Lecter,” “drill, baby, drill,” “a nation in decline,” “Crooked Joe Biden, the worst president in the history of our country,” “the January 6th hoax,” and “the China virus” that the “radical left Democrats” used for cheating on elections. As cruel as it is, nobody in the wider world cares all that much about or long remembers the J.D. Tippits, the Henry Rathbones, the Tim McCarthys, and the Corey Comperatores—collateral damage in our bloody historical narrative.

Because there obviously is a place for this kind of violence in America. This is who we are. And the last thing most people want is for anybody to turn down the rhetoric. If anything, we’d like it cranked up even louder. Call of Duty loud. Grand Theft Auto loud. The Zapruder film on a nonstop loop for 60 years and counting, with Jackie Kennedy, out of her mind, climbing over the back of the seat in the open presidential limo to retrieve fragments of her husband’s head. Over and over and over and over. No surprise that the first of Trump’s would-be assassins back in the summer 2024 internet-searched “how far away was Oswald from Kennedy?”

Trump, also to no one’s surprise, has been chortling about the bloody-faced, fist-pumping photo of him taken by a New York Times photographer ever since: “A lot of people say it’s the most iconic photo they’ve ever seen,” he boasted to the New York Post shortly after the shooting. “Usually you have to die to have an iconic picture.”

His minions, meanwhile, were already saying that Joe Biden ordered the attempted assassination, and wanted him arrested, charged, tried, and executed. If not for divine intervention, they claimed—of the sort denied the children of Uvalde, Parkland, Columbine, and Sandy Hook—we would be tragically Trumpless today.

Not that all that many people seemed to be paying much attention. Dana Milbank in The Washington Post reported that only 16 million tuned into broadcast and cable news the evening of July 13, 2024 to watch coverage of the Trump rally shooting, according to the Nielsen ratings—8 million fewer than had watched Joe Biden’s post-NATO press conference a few days earlier to see if he could finish his sentences. Then again, who watches the evening news anymore? Most probably skipped ahead to the TikToks and memes.

We’ve been assassinating politicians (and civil rights leaders, and labor organizers) for a lot longer than I’ve been around—though we upped the game significantly when I was a kid. At last count, assassins have shot seven presidents, killing four, with dozens of attempts abandoned or foiled at the last minute—one involving a forklift, one a hand grenade, and one a dynamite-laden 1950 Buick. In 1864, an unidentified sniper in Washington missed Abraham Lincoln’s head by mere inches but did manage to put a hole through the Great Emancipator’s signature stovepipe hat. Eleven of the past 12 presidents have endured assassination attempts and/or documented plots against their lives. Then there were Gretchen Whitmer, Gabby Giffords, Steve Scalise, George Wallace, Bobby Kennedy, Hillary Clinton….

Those of us of a certain age can still tell you where we were when we learned that JFK had been killed as his motorcade made its way through Dallas just hours after landing at the hauntingly misnamed Love Field. For me, it was a fourth-grade classroom at Riverside Elementary in Fort Meade, Florida, when the principal came to the door that afternoon, Nov. 22, 1963, an 80-degree day even though Thanksgiving was right around the corner. I don’t know how I knew right away—The teacher’s sagging face when he gave her the news, well out of earshot of us kids? Her fighting back tears after the principal left and she sat at her desk, ignoring our waving hands and requests to go to the bathroom? Her silence until just before the bell rang and she finally had to step to the front of the room and address the class?—but somehow I did.

We were all quiet after she told us. We quietly put our things away in our desks. We quietly picked up our lunchboxes and books. We quietly filed out of the room. All except Grace Ann Cannon, who once we were outside started cheering. She might have even danced in the grass, happily swinging the pocketbook she always carried—and that she once clobbered me over the head with for some reason, breaking the latch and spilling the contents out all over the sidewalk. I didn’t know if it was because Kennedy was Catholic. Or because he wasn’t racist enough. Or because Castro had gotten the better of him in the botched Bay of Pigs invasion. Or because her parents were ardent Nixon supporters.

The rest of us just looked at Grace Ann blankly. We didn’t know what we were supposed to do. How we were supposed to feel. What it all meant. I mean, we knew it was terrible, that somebody had assassinated Kennedy like John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln. But we were in a daze—all except Grace Ann. My older brother, Wayne, was a fifth-grader that year. Most likely we met up at the bike rack and pedaled home the way we always did to our house on Orange Avenue. But I doubt we talked about it. I don’t remember a conversation, anyway, and I doubt I had the words, the language, the context, anything. Mom was home. The house was dark. I went into the bedroom and climbed on the top bunk of our bunkbeds and lay there and cried for a long time. I felt awful, and there was nothing I could think of to do. Mom was sad, too. Wayne left the house to go hang out down the street with his best friend, David Bailey. I was supposed to have a sleepover that night with my buddy David Carefoot, but when I finally stopped crying and came out of the bedroom, Mom said it wasn’t a good idea, and we should all be together as a family. I don’t remember much after that, either. Probably Mom said a special prayer at dinner after Dad came home from his job as an engineer at one of the nearby phosphate mines. Probably we just watched TV the rest of the evening: The Great Adventure. Route 66. The Twilight Zone. Alfred Hitchcock Presents if they let us stay up that late.

Two days later, a Sunday afternoon, I came in from playing and found Mom alone in the living room again, staring at our black and white TV, which was never on during the day. The ironing board was up, and she was holding the steaming iron, but most of Dad’s work shirts and khaki work slacks still sat wrinkled in the clothes basket. CBS was showing film of Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of the Dallas Police Headquarters. It had just happened, on live TV. Oswald’s eyes were pinched shut. His mouth was open in a crooked “O,” his face twisted in pain. His arms were pulled in tight, trying to protect himself, but already too late. Jack Ruby, seen only from the back, wore a shiny black suit and a fedora, like a mobster. I was surprised at how small his Colt Cobra .38 was—a model and caliber I couldn’t possibly have known at the time. Thirty years later it would sell at auction for a quarter of a million dollars. Never too late to fetishize. I was surprised at how small Oswald was, too, and how tidy, his shirt collar neatly arranged over the neck of his dark sweater. The biggest man in the scene, the detective James Leavelle, handcuffed to Oswald, filled half of the frame in his tan suit, skinny polka-dot tie, and Stetson hat. He was leaning away, but only slightly, recoiling, though still keeping a tight grip with his left hand on Oswald’s belt, all while glowering at Ruby and the firing gun. But the deed was already done.

Oswald would die from his gunshot wound on the way to the same hospital where Kennedy had been pronounced dead two days earlier. Ruby, who had left his beloved dachshund, Sheba, in his car while he went inside to kill Oswald, would die in 1967, from cancer, while in prison waiting for a second trial. Leavelle, who as a younger man had survived the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, would pass away in 2019 at 99—after telling the story of Oswald’s courthouse murder thousands of times over the years, and eventually donating or selling his suit, tie, Stetson hat, and handcuffs to the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, in the former Texas School Book Depository. That, of course—unless you believe one or more of the conspiracy theories—was where Oswald fired the shots that killed Kennedy, nearly killed Texas Gov. John Connally, and kicked up a chunk of concrete that struck the face of a car salesman named James Tague. Tague later wrote not one but two books about the Kennedy assassination in which he contended that then-Vice President Lyndon Johnson was behind the whole thing.

I stood in front of the TV for the longest time with Mom that day, horrified but unable to look away, as if watching Ruby kill Oswald enough times would help me understand something important—about guns, political murder, our violent nature, America. It truly felt in those moments as if the world was ending. For the past three years at school we’d been having atomic bomb drills, hiding under our desks, or racing home to lock ourselves in the bathroom, and I was already worried we might all die soon. Now, with John Kennedy assassinated and Oswald killed on live TV in front of God and everybody—and me and Mom—I didn’t know what to think about anything anymore.

It was, of course, only the beginning.

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Steve Watkins is editor of The FXBG Advance. You can find his author/bio page HERE, and you’re welcome to contact him HERE.