On Saturday, June 23 1990, I boarded a jumbo jet at London’s Heathrow Airport to fly home. New Zealand is about as far away as you can get to enjoy living in a socially developed country and yet be separated by distance from the rest of the civilized world. It’s about 12000 miles from England to Auckland, which can be traveled direct in twenty-four hours. I was breaking the journey in America, so the trip was not going to be as murderous on my body. I had been traveling in Europe on business and had one last stopover on the way home. I was flying to Dallas, Texas.

On long hauls like this, I would treat myself to the comfort and peace of the first-class cabin and settled back to enjoy the champagne and the attention of the cabin staff. My stopover in Dallas was only two days and I was arriving late at night. One thing I had promised myself: on the Sunday I was going to visit Dealey Plaza, walk down Elm Street, stand on the pedestal next to the pergola where Abraham Zapruder had taken that historical home movie, and look across at the grassy knoll -- down to the overpass and back up to the Texas School Book Depository.

Like so many people growing up in the fifties and sixties, I was fascinated by the myth and legend that had evolved around the Kennedys and disappointed and saddened to find out that the President would turn out to be like all of us. Not a king holding court at Camelot, but a human being, full of doubts and weaknesses. A man so full of power and passion, blessed with good looks and obvious charm, heading up an administration that was youthful, tenacious and tough as nails, but also stylish and efficient in facing up to unpopular issues; yet at the same time, a wanton womanizer, who would fall in and out of bed with a pretty face or voluptuous figure whenever the urge overtook him.  I wanted to visit the spot where he spent his last moments. I wanted to see, if by being there, I could somehow understand him better.

After arriving at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport and clearing immigration, I arrived downtown late in the evening and checked into the Hyatt Regency Hotel. On previous visits to Dallas, I had stayed out in the Metro area, and this was my first time in the commercial center of the second biggest city in Texas. I wasn’t quite sure just where the hotel lay in relation to the Dealey Plaza, but knew it was close by.

The next morning I was up and about early. My room was on the eighteenth floor, and when I pulled back the drapes on the huge picture window, I was staggered by the view. Of all the hotels in Dallas to choose from, I had somehow picked the perfect one. I was right above the scene of one of the greatest tragedies modern America has witnessed. I looked straight down on the vista that had been the setting for those terrible few seconds that literally changed the world. There beneath me, like some huge diorama, lay the overpass, Elm Street and the Texas School Book Depository building.

I was down the elevator and out of the hotel in minutes. It was Sunday and, like most cities everywhere, on this day, especially this early, the city belonged to whoever wanted it. There was little traffic and even fewer people about. I walked up Main Street towards the ornamental pools on Houston and then swung across the grass towards Elm Street until I was standing almost opposite the grassy knoll.

It was still and quite, with only the occasional vehicle moving along the deserted streets. Up behind the pergola and in among the trees flanking the car park beyond, I could see the odd movement, tramps or vagrants, stirring from their restless night under the stars. Off to my right, the squat, dumpy shape of the Depository building sat brooding over Dealey Plaza, named after George Bannerman Dealey, founder of the Dallas Morning News, much as it must have done that awful November day in 1963.

Presidential Limousine, Nov. 23, 1963 (Richard Tullius Collection)

Here it had all happened. The world’s most powerful man, the youngest U.S. president ever elected with a beautiful woman by his side, shot dead in full view -- the third US president to die by an assassin’s bullet. Twenty-seven years before, right on this street, a car full of people was ambushed by a killer or killers. Here, rolling down Elm Street at ten or twelve miles an hour, comes the presidential car SS100X , the black, stretch Lincoln Continental limousine, twenty-one feet long, over three tons in weight.  I could see Secret Service Agent Clinton J. Hill leaping in desperation for the back of the open car; Mrs. Kennedy leaning over towards him --reaching out in a futile gesture to recover part of her husband’s head, blown away by a bullet. It would lie in the street until the next day when it was recovered by a medical student, Billy Harper, and handed in to the authorities.

Abraham Zapruder with his camera

People everywhere, screaming and shouting, throwing themselves down onto the grass to avoid the fields of fire. And up on a four-foot-high concrete block to the right of the John Neely Bryan Pergola steps, Abraham Zapruder, hefting a 8mm Bell and Howell Movie Camera, being steadied by his receptionist, Marilyn Sitzman, shooting a 26-second, 500-frame film that would become the holy grail for what New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison would come to call the “murder at the heart of the American dream.”

The killing of Kennedy was the quintessential assassination that became the benchmark against which all other conspiratorial murders would be measured. Probably more words have been written about his death than any other in history. His apparent killer was arrested within hours, only himself to fall victim to a bullet within forty-eight hours. This second killing would create and generate an aura of confusion and suspicion that demanded explanation, but never really received it. It pales into relative insignificance however, when stacked against the mystery surrounding the shooting of the man who was killed in Dealey Plaza.

The first official government investigation, created by newly-elected President, Lyndon B. Johnson, under executive order 11130 a week after the killing, appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren to ascertain the facts concerning the assassination.  This was issued as the Warren Commission Report, twenty-six unindexed volumes, released a year after President Kennedy was killed. It seemed to raise as many questions as it answered.

The murder was over in seconds. The search for the truth behind the killing has gone on for thirty-seven years. Pontius Pilate once asked Jesus: “What is truth?” We have been struggling ever since to answer this.  As the years pass, it seems inevitable that we will never know for sure what and who was behind the killing of President John Kennedy.

There are so many loose ends they could probably fill every room on all the seven floors of the book depository. Was there one gunman or two or three? Some sources claim over fifty different names as potential shooters that day. Was Harvey Oswald an agent of the FBI and the CIA or both? Who were the Black Dog and Badge men? What was the “Umbrella Man” doing on the grass verge? What were the three “tramps” doing on the overpass? Was the Mafia behind the killing or the CIA or the Russians or the Cubans or some rapid right-wing movement? How did it happen, why did it happen and most of all who made it happen?

Was it possible that Oswald, a mediocre -to -downright-poor marksman, according to various sources, could fire that rifle with such speed and precision at a moving target, partly obscured by trees, creating such havoc and mayhem with a weapon the Italian army called “ the humanitarian rifle” because it never killed anybody when deliberately aimed. A twenty-five dollar, World War One vintage rifle with a single bolt action and a misaligned telescopic sight? Could he have hit a moving target in the given time frame, 270 feet away, a feat expert FBI and Army marksmen were unable to emulate on stationary targets?  Why on earth would Oswald send off under an alias to buy a mail order weapon, when he could have bought an accurate gun on any street corner in Dallas? Why use a bolt-action rifle, when he could have used an automatic weapon such as a BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle) or even an M1 carbine that would have allowed a lot more shots and a lot faster? So many questions, so few satisfactory answers.

I wandered around the Dealey Plaza, looking in vain for any kind of formal recognition of its place in American history. But there were no plaques or monuments, no statues to fallen heroes. The lawns were green and well tended. The streets were clean and there was an orderliness and almost surgical precision about the three acres of the park that made me think I was wandering around a museum -- which, in fact, in a way it is. Not storing artifacts or objects of historic or cultural interest, but memories of images and actions, that for one brief moment in time changed for all time, the soul of a nation.

In their wisdom, the Dallas city fathers did eventually get around to erecting a monument of sorts. A spare, geometric stone cube, it sits two blocks back from the site of the assassination on a plot of land between Elm and Main Streets. It was erected in 1970, designed by architect Philip Johnson, but I knew nothing of it, and so did not find my way there that Sunday morning. On a later visit to Dallas, I found myself standing and looking at this bland, concrete non-event. Banal, faceless, tucked away from the scene of the crime, almost as though Dallas, not unnaturally, was ashamed to admit to hosting the most infamous act of twentieth-century American history.

There is a plaque placed outside the memorial that reads in part:

“The joy and excitement of John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s life belonged to all men. So did the pain and sorrow of his death. This is not a memorial to the pain and sorrow of death, but stands as a permanent tribute to the joy and excitement of one man’s life.”

In a way, the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Memorial in Dallas could serve as a memorial, not for the murder of a president, but for the death of truth.