JFK killing Sunday, November 24, 199E takes on life JFK's of its own slaying By Jeff Gammage INQUIRER STAFF WRITER Now we know who killed JFK. 11 wasn't rogue elements of the CIA, angry lives on in right-wing Cubans, or capos in the Chicago mob. It was the Cigarette-Smoking Man, the nameless, conspiratorial operative of The - pop culture Files. He bumped off Kennedy at the behest of shadowy superiors in the U.S. military from Et during last week's episode. as dated as pillbox hats. Rather, they say, it And Fox Television's spooky hit show I means that 33 years later, Americans are isn't the only program to re-create the kill- still trying to understand its implications. ing. And they're doing it in ways that let them Once a subject almost too painful to men- explore unusual explanations and out- tion, and later the focus of more-detached comes. inquiries into grassy knolls and exit "The moment of the Kennedy assassina- wounds, President John F. Kennedy's assas- tion has taken on the kind of mythic signifi- sination has become the stuff of pop cul- cance that breaks down the difference be- ture. tween fact and fiction," said Ralph In one new collection of short stories, Whitehead. a professor at the University of Kennedy isn't dead at all. He's alive and Massachusetts at Amherst. "The 'whodunit' heading to the auction of Jackie's estate, dimension of our treatment of the assassina- determined to recover his Harvard-crest tion is tapering off. The 'What-did-it-mean- cuff links. In comic hooks, an ethereal John for-me-and-the-country?' dimensidn re- Kennedy presides over the wasteland of a mains very strong." parallel universe, a job made all the more Kennedy died on Nov. 22, 1963, shot to challenging by his grievous head injury. death. the government declared, by a single "Alternative versions of the assassination gunman acting alone — . are everywhere," said Alison Scott, head of For much of the 1960s, JFK's assassination the Pop Culture Library at Bowling Green remained a raw, aching wound — an anni- State University in Ohio. "It's like Elvis." hilation not just of the man but of a na-. On television shows such as NBC's Dark tional sense of purpose and optimism. When Skies and in venues such as the Internet, it was discussed at all, the killing was people are being offered substitute versions treated in a documentary fashion, as ordi- of that fateful 1963 motorcade through nary people waited for officialdom and offi- downtown . It's as if the word has cialdom's leading skeptics to thrash out the gone forth to a new generation of TV writ- facts. ers and authors, declaring that the assassi- By the late 1970s, with the healing fos- nation is no longer taboo for them. tered by time, people could examine the Scholars of American culture say the shooting as a murder case and search for move toward the mainstream has been answers about who was responsible: building for years. And they say that - They found nothing definitive. Now, aside from questions of taste — it's not in- scholars said, the narrative power of the herently bad. event has begun to dominate, inviting a Making the assassination the focus of a more mythologized handling. TV drama doesn't mean Kennedy's death In the X-Files re-creation, the. assassina- has become some distant historical event, tion is carried out by the mysterious Ciga- - See ASSASSINATION on E4 rette-Smoking Man, who has long thwarted FBI investigations by agents and . Flashbacks snowea the assassin as a The killing is works to touch on tne muroer. unver young Army captain fascinating a Stone's 1991 movie, JFK, imagined that the who, after being in- CIA, FBI, Secret Service, Dallas Police De- terrupted while new crop of partment and numerous other agencies con- reading The Man- spired to kill the president and cover it up. writers. The In the 1993 film churian Candidate, In the Line of Fire, Clint accepts his superi- event, with Eastwood portrayed a Secret Service agent ors' proposal to kill haunted by his failure that day in Dallas, Kennedy. Oswald is some new Thousands of assassination Web sites ex- framed, depicted as twists, is ist on the Internet. And in Dallas, a new what he claimed to finding its attraction lets tourists ride in an open lim- be in real life — a ousine as it rolls through Dealey Plea — a patsy. way onto TV, death tour complete with the recorded Among the new the Net and crack of rifle fire as the car passes the Texas written treatments School Book Depository. of the assassination other media. It was from that building, the Warren is a fictional story Commission concluded in 1964, that Oswald by Pulitzer Prize-winning author • Robert shot America's popular young president. Olen Butler titled "JFK Secretly Attends When Jack Ruby shot Oswald to- death in Jackie Auction." the basement of the Dallas jail two days In this version, presented in Butler's book later, he sparked an enduring public suspi- Tabloid Dreams, JFK survived the shooting cion of conspiracy. with reason and memory-intact. But gone is A 1979 government investigation found his ability to hold his tongue. The CIA, fear- evidence of a second gunman. But no one ful that the president would spout state se- has definitive answers. And that has led crets to whomever he met, has confined people to search elsewhere, in places such him at a secret compound in Virginia since as The X-Files. 1963. "People need some kind of venue to retell This Kennedy has grown old, watching history, to play with some of its unresolved the violence that nearly took his life claim threads," said Barbie Zelizer, an associate that of his brother and his contemporaries. professor at Temple University. "And "I will always remember where I was on the they're willing to go to great lengths in pop day Martin was shot," Kennedy says, refer- culture to do it." ring to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Zelizer, the author of Covering the Body: Kennedy, alone and desperate for the The Kennedy Assassination, the Media and touch of strangers who once so eagerly the Shaping of Collective Memory, expects sought his hand, is granted one day of free- the story to be told far into the future, in dom to attend the Sotheby's auction of his different ways and different forms, with late wife's possessions. But the 54.000 he has many different outcomes, scraped together is too little to buy even a "Why wouldn't it be told? That's more the tie clasp. question," Zelizer said. "People we looking "These treatments are not really about for other explanations." the assassination per se, the assassination as an event," said Whitehead, a journalism professor. "The subject is our continuing psychological engagement in the event." To be sure, these are not the first popular