Currently in the Marriott, Dallas bracing myself for another Greyhound beasting to California.
On Tuesday I headed into Downtown Austin in the late afternoon, had something to eat and then wandered around a few bars in the 6th Street area. It was election day, but it’s fair to say the air was filled with apathy, although there was coverage on all the TV screens, which seem to be present in every yank bar/ restaurant. There have been a lot of political adverts on the TV and radio over the past few weeks, all for people I’ve never heard of. The 2 things I’ve noticed are firstly just how vicious and unlikely some of them are such as “’Fred Smith’ doesn’t want you to have a job, he wants to give your job to China”, and secondly the fact that most of the adverts concentrated on individuals and you rarely heard which party they actually represented. Having voted twice in my life (when I was 18), Conservative in the ’97 Labour landslide, and then in the referendum against Scotland having its own parliament (which I prophesised would be a horrendous, pointless waste of money... and lo, it came to pass...), I realised that voting wasn’t something I seemed to have a particular winning ability at, so I lost interest. I only compete at what I’m good at. I’m also not a Western politician or political journalist, so I’m quite happy to take democracy for granted, as my livelihood doesn’t depend on it.
I was waiting for my friend to finish work at 8 and she’d told me not to go to ‘Bikini’s’ bar because it was full of ‘trashy, slutty’ girls, so I thought that sounded ideal, and headed in there. At the bar I got chatting to a guy and a girl who were marketing reps for Nike and were in Austin for work from Chicago, and they said “You must drop by when you’re in Chicago”... Stand by! Once my friend finished work we all met up, along with some other mates of hers, and went for dinner at some uber-smart steak restaurant... the robust bill for which ended up going on the Nike expense account! Payback for all the trainers and PT kit I’ve bought there over the years! After dinner we did a pub crawl around the various bars on 6th street, which is allegedly the ‘live music capital of the world’. I’m not particularly interested in music, live or otherwise, but I did hear a convincing, live version of an all time favourite ‘Sweet child o’ mine’, which did impress me as that usually gets murdered by anyone other than Axl. We also went into a bar which had an electronic rodeo thing to hold onto, which I obviously went on- and held on for dear life! We then got cocktails and shots at a bar where some particularly hormonal barmaid was giving instructions on precisely how to consume a drink called a ‘blow-job’. I asked her if she had any ‘zip-ties’/ plasti-cuffs behind the bar to enhance the experience, and while everyone else laughed, she decided to leave us to it...
In the morning I was taken to get a ‘taco’ breakfast, which is basically a fajita (probably not supposed to say that in Texas) with bacon, eggs etc inside, which was well appreciated. I then got on the bus for the 4 hr trip from Austin, through Waco and a couple of places I’d never heard of, to get to Dallas about 2.30PM. Once in Dallas my plan was to find a Starbucks (as per S.O.P.’s) and then Google up some accommodation- however I couldn’t find one!! I passed a McD’s, the other wifi office, but it was rammed full of loads of what the Guardian/ BBC would call ‘youths’, and I realised it was the first time in Texas I hadn’t felt totally safe and relaxed out and about with all my kit. Once I’d strolled past them and down Lamar, I just walked into the first hotel I saw, which happened to be the Marriott (an expense I can justify to myself with amount of nights spent on Greyhounds!), got a room for the night (with a 30% ‘Government’ discount thanks to Army ID...), and then headed out to see what I’d come to Dallas to see...
While I’m fairly cynical about conspiracy theorists and theories, I was keen to see where JFK was shot, the ‘grassy knoll’, and make my own mind up. The Texas Schoolbook Depository now contains the museum on the 6th floor (5th floor really, but yanks can’t count upwards in buildings) where Lee Harvey Oswald ‘slotted’ JFK back in 1963. As well as the assassination, the museum goes into enormous, but interesting (to me) detail about JFK’s election campaign and presidency. While possibly making him appear too good to be true, you could see why this apparently nice chap, with the credibility of a decent Military record in WW2 was so ‘iconic’. Like most politicians, he said things that people wanted to hear, but he clearly wanted the best for his country (unusual, I know), and during the 13 days of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 he demonstrated that he certainly had the moral courage to take the difficult option, which most pretty boy, liberal politicians (Blair, Clinton, Obama) might not necessarily have chosen, and faced down the Soviets. As a result of the credibility this earned him with the Russkies, he managed to negotiate the first nuclear arms treaty the following year, from a position of strength. He was, and still is, highly regarded by the US military (which certainly can’t be said of the 2 most recent Democrat presidents) a fact which was demonstrated by the Green Berets (a unit for people who hate drill and ceremonies) seen marching with his coffin at his funeral.
In contrast to JFK, Lee Harvey Oswald was a problem child born into a ‘broken home’ in New Orleans, who was brought up there, New York and Texas. He served for a spell in the US Marines, where he had mixed reports. Although he wasn’t a sniper, like all US Marines, as well as all British infantrymen, he would have learned how to shoot straight- the suggestion from conspiracy theorists that he was a ‘bad shot’ as a US Marine is similar to criticising the person who comes last in the Olympic 100m final as ‘slow’. It’s all relative. After the Marines, which he bluffed his way out of, he went and spent time in the Soviet Union, where he married a Russian girl, after he’d developed communist sympathies, which seemed to tie in with his attention seeking antics as a child. A couple of years later he came back to the States and while living in Texas the couple received, understandably, a fair amount of attention from the FBI, as well as local law enforcement officials. On one occasion he went to the FBI office and left a note for a particular Agent saying that if they didn’t leave his wife alone he’d blow up that building and the Dallas Police Department. At some point during this time, he also got a job working at the Texas Schoolbook Depository.
In November 1963 President Kennedy arrived in Texas for a 2 day tour of 5 cities as a prelude to his campaign for re-election the following year. As the President’s convoy was driving from Dallas airport, along a well publicised route, to a lunch meeting it passed the Texas Schoolbook Depository at 1230 and Oswald fired 3 shots at a range of less than 100m, which having seen the site from both ends, was not far off straight downwards. He even managed to miss one round- mong! The area where the vehicle was located is on a downward slope, right next to the infamous ‘grassy knoll’, which is just a tiny piece of grass that slopes a few yards up from the pavement, and is in clear view. While the rounds would have more or less gone over the knoll from Oswald’s position, I suspect the acoustics could well have caused an additional echo to have come from that direction as well- although any additional shooter would have been in clear view of the Secret Service bodyguards, who would no doubt have turned him into ‘pink mist’.
Immediately after the shooting, the Depository was sealed off as witnesses had seen a ‘man with a long barrelled weapon’ leaning out of the window, but as they were sealing it, Oswald walked past the police and out of the building and was reported as being the only absent member of staff in the subsequent roll-call. Within minutes the police had broadcast a description of him as a suspect in the assassination and about 40 minutes later Dallas PD Officer Tippit attempted to detain Oswald, but was shot dead. Oswald was then spotted running into a theatre and was pursued and captured by the police, less than an hour and a half after JFK had been shot. A couple of days later Oswald was himself killed by another ‘village idiot’ type, Jack Ruby, who the police described as a man with aspirations to be a police officer, but not the ability.
My main thought on hearing all the suggestions of additional gunmen, whether on the grassy knoll or anywhere else, is ‘Why?’ This guy’s just put 2 large calibre rounds into him, what would be the point of an additional shooter firing at the same time? It seems, much like the death of Princess Diana, that certain hysterical types can’t accept that ‘iconic’ ‘celebrities’ die in just the same way as everyone else- albeit unlike Diana, JFK was murdered by an idiot with a grudge against life, but he’s not the first or last victim of bad luck. I imagine if both he and Oswald hadn’t both been in Dallas on the same day, history would have been somewhat different.
Right time to see what else goes on in Dallas, maybe I’ll solve JR’s murder next...
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