Zapruder, Camelot, and "the Real America."

President Kennedy moments before he was assassinated in Dallas, November 22nd, 1963. (Courtesy: People).

(The following was written a year ago to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination.  It was heretofore unpublished.)

“It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.”

-Mark Twain.

“In my stars I am/ above thee, but be not afraid of greatness…

/Thy Fates open/ their hands. Let thy blood and spirit embrace them.”

-Shakespeare (Twelfth Night, Act II Scene V).

In the course of our recent, dare I say uniquely-American, “celebration” of the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas, and the frantic hunt by conspiracy theorists and other scholars to finally discover some long-hidden deeper meaning to it all—a desperate search to finally find out “why?”—I came to a realization that shines light on the story from an entirely different perspective. It’s really the most important perspective that we have; and sadly it’s sometimes overlooked, taken for granted by too many of those who have seen it.

If there is any deeper meaning to be gleaned from the events of November 22^nd, 1963 in Dealey Plaza, it lies with one man, a very certain shooter who was standing on that infamous grassy knoll. No, not that kind of shooter. My meaning isn’t some shadowy character hiding behind a picket fence with a gun. That sort of shooter only lives in the minds of Oliver Stone and his ilk. The shooter I reference, on the other hand, is very real and easily defined. He was armed not with a sniper’s rifle, but with a Zoomatic 8mm video camera. He shot not bullets at the President, but instead the most important 26.6 seconds of grainy silent film ever taken in American history.

His name was Abraham Zapruder. And as Jack Kennedy slumped over into his wife’s lap and died, it was Zapruder who quickly became the most important man on the scene. In an oddly prophetic way it seems appropriate that it would be the Ukrainian-born dressmaker who filmed the only visual evidence of the most infamous murder of the twentieth century. Especially considering his origin, that he ran halfway across the globe to escape the horrors of the Russian Civil War and the consolidation of Lenin’s hold on power, it comes across as a darkly perfect example of an “only in America” moment—the idea that anyone from anywhere can be anything—that the foreign-born small business man would have his name forever attached to the name of one our nation’s most revered leaders, immortalized for the ages by the ghastly sight of “Zapruder frame 313” (the ever-chilling image of the third bullet tearing through Kennedy’s head).

But that’s not really enough, is it? Something larger tugs at the mind. Perhaps this is something grander in scale, a proof of Shakespeare’s human universality that “some have greatness thrust upon 'em,” that anyone can by chance (be it luck, fate, or however else you might have it) become, if not powerful, at least of the highest importance.

Perhaps we really have been looking in the wrong direction. Perhaps we’ve spent too many years looking for why Jack Kennedy died and not enough time thinking about what his death really meant. For what it’s worth, I don’t hate Kennedy. On balance, I have something of a respect for him. A man whose platform was for tax cuts, balanced budgets, and civil rights was an admirable man indeed. Throw in a hard line against the Soviets and communism, and that goes double. His firm stance during the Cuban Missile Crisis, worthy of its long remembrance in the American mind, was rightly the genesis of his legacy. But, fittingly enough, his was a legacy that to survive almost had to be sealed in blood.

“Camelot,” that gaudy monstrosity of a name by which we’ve been told we are to remember that lurid time, was a lie, even if it was a good one. From his supposed perfect marriage to the fashion icon wife, to his rock-star persona (with the built-in personality cult), and the constant parties, the omnipresence of refined culture and high society, everything surrounded by regal furnishings, it was all a hollow sham. In his real personal life he was anything but virtuous. He was an idealist, and maybe a great one at that, but he was a much better at saying than he ever was at doing. “Getting things done,” as we call it, would be left to that wretched lug Lyndon Johnson, and get things done he sure did (not just stopping at the just and noble goal of civil rights; but continuing on to an alarming big government state, his “great society,” whose own legacy ought to be forever questioned in its own right).

No, much like the mythic King Arthur and his court, the Kennedy Camelot wasn’t real. More importantly it wasn’t the real America. Shakespeare’s quote from Twelfth Night has two other parts; a large fraction of the other great leaders in American history all did great big things, they were amongst the some who “achieve greatness.” Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Reagan, both of the Roosevelts, Eisenhower…the list of names that come to mind goes on and on. Kennedy, however, was different. Jack Kennedy was “born great,” but achieved little. Jack Kennedy, whatever good there is to say about him, is nothing quite like anyone on the list above (regardless of how you feel about him or anyone on that list). He was a rich kid with connections and a good war story (this is not to discredit the valor of his service), “chosen” by his father to be President because his older brother had the bad fortune of dying young.

Abraham Zapruder, on the other hand, was exactly what defines “the real America.” He was a self-made man, not of great distinction, but not of poor disposition, either. He came to the other side of the globe not for any guarantees, but for a chance to succeed (not at all unlike my own grandfather, incidentally). In the course of many years spent in the shuffle of the free market, he had the good fortune of doing well for himself. By that good fortune he bought a movie camera, a top of the line model.

This fairy tale of Camelot simply could not survive forever. At some point the bubble would have to burst, yet no one could ever have expected it to play out the way it did. It all ended with a crack of thunder when the President was slain in the back of his own limousine as it rolled down Elm Street. And Zapruder just stood there and watched, and filmed. Jack Kennedy died, and the car sped off. The metaphor in there is dark, but it can’t be denied. Zapruder and his film are the real America, watching in stunned silence, as the great sham falls apart in front of them. And then, as he rolled off screen, the real America switched off its camera and moved on. The lie was now unraveled, even if violently and unexpectedly so. It was now relegated to memory, an image of a time that was. But Zapruder’s world, the aforementioned “real America,” is grounded in firmer reality, and so outlived Camelot.

In the end, regardless of any symbolic meaning that may be gleaned from the circumstance of his death, the fact remains that Jack Kennedy really and truly died for nothing.  While many specifics will always remain vague, general motive is unbelievably straightforward: Lee Harvey Oswald, the discontented Marxist sociopath, struck out, alone, just so that he could finally prove to the world that he was powerful (Peter Jennings and computer animator Dale K. Myers, in The Kennedy Assassination: Beyond Conspiracy, present a powerful visual argument that lays sole responsibility on Oswald). Around this, the who, what, when, where, and how of the crime all fall into place with relative ease. The complete opposite of Lincoln and Booth, Oswald’s personal interest in Kennedy was all but negligible. Kennedy was condemned by sad coincidence; Oswald’s animus against Kennedy stems only from that fate had decided to drive the President past his place of employment before anyone else of public importance could be. The homicide of the century was set in motion not by hungry schemers, but by total chance. A roll of the dice, if you will.

Such a concept ultimately leads to a sort of psychological disconnect. We can’t accept this, William Manchester explains, so we let ourselves believe in things that we can’t prove. He says, “to employ what may seem an odd metaphor,” we don’t have any problem accepting the Holocaust, because if the two sides were put on a scale “you have a rough balance: greatest crime, greatest criminals.” Put Kennedy and Oswald on either side of the same scale, however, and the President weighs it down. So “you want to add something weightier to Oswald. It would invest the President’s death with meaning…He would have died for something. A conspiracy would, of course, do the job nicely.”

Somehow, after all of this, yet one more strange twist of irony remains. Whatever personal resentments Oswald may have harbored against Jack Kennedy, killing him may very well have only served to set him free. A brief examination of contemporary history shows that the constraints of time (particularly second-terms) have a long record of causing fatigue. Influences wane, and new guards are swept in. But this isn’t so with the dead Kennedy; there are no term limits on martyrs, and for his personality cult, that’s what he had now become.

“Camelot,” as a name for the time, wasn’t even a thing until after he died. Jackie came up with it. Camelot was a musical, and apparently his favorite line was "Don't let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot." Evidently she wasn’t sure if that was obvious enough, so she kept going until all of her doubts were erased. "There'll be great Presidents again," she goes on, "but there'll never be another Camelot again … it will never be that way again."

But what if he hadn’t died? What if that “brief shining moment” hadn’t been so brief? Would Jack Kennedy have been such a uniquely great President, would that spot still have been known as Camelot? Well, in a word, no. Had he lived to see the end of his first term and moved into his second, I see a Presidency that would have played out like a watered-down Johnson administration. With his support for civil rights and fierce opposition to the communists, he still would have crushed Barry Goldwater in ’64. Like Johnson, he would be long remembered for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but in his own time likely affected by Vietnam. No, this Camelot wouldn’t have ended under a storm of bullets, and wouldn’t have been remembered as such. This Camelot would’ve collapsed under the weight of hard reality, washed away by the second coming of Tricky Dick.
-Mitch Carter, a history/secondary education major at Aurora University, is an Illinois State Scholar and member of the Kendall County Young Republicans.