And they say Dallas has no focal point, no Central Park or Trafalgar Square. On this bright jewel of a Saturday in early April 2011, Dealey Plaza at the western entrance to downtown is the city's beating heart.
Mark Graham
Every weekend at Dealey Plaza, Robert Groden sells books and
CDs based on the House Select Committee's finding that JFK was shot from the grassy knoll.
Mark Graham
Vendors wander the plaza selling souvenir newspapers.
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President John F. Kennedy, his wife Jackie, Governor John Connally and his wife Nellie are parked at the fatal X on Elm Street in that famous 1961 Lincoln Continental convertible limousine. At the meticulous direction of a National Geographic film crew working on a new conspiracy theory, the actors move their heads ever so slightly this way and that, just a tick at a time. They look like robots on the blink.
An intense burr-cut man in his 20s is up on a boom lift in front of the famous Sniper's Nest in the former School Book Depository Building, clicking off silent rifle shots with a replica of that famous 6.5 mm Carcano-type Model 91/38 rifle. About 50 tourists have gathered on the sidewalks to watch.
On that famous grassy knoll above this freeze-framed diorama of national horror, 40 to 50 frail, elderly African-American Shriners—all bedecked in medals and wearing tall, wonderfully multicolored fezzes—are attempting to assemble for a group photo. Apparently the slope is tricky for them. A kind of generalized group-doddering is going on with much stumbling and elbow-grabbing. Every time the impatient photographer barks another order, the Shriners clutch each other as if on the deck of a storm-tossed ship.
Behind the Shriners in the famous pergola, a smaller group who describe themselves as "hip-hop positive" are assembling a large array of sound equipment. All obviously American, they explain a little disconcertingly that they are here in Dealey Plaza today to serve the cause of Syrian freedom.
Floating between the assassination car, the hip-hop positive Syrian freedom group and the storm-tossed Shriners, half a dozen clowns in full makeup and frizzy-haired regalia have appeared. Their affiliation is unclear.
But that's not the point.
In a makeshift outdoor store at the far end of the pergola, Kennedy assassination author and conspiracist Robert Groden, who worked on the staff of the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978 and still owns a copy of the famous Zapruder film, is convinced that the hip-hop positive people with their gigantic sound system—whom he has encountered before and finds very obnoxious—have no genuine connection with Syrian freedom at all. He insists their "damn Libyan blast rap" is in fact part of a city of Dallas conspiracy to shut down his store and thereby silence critics of the famous Warren Commission.
The wonderful thing is, his theory is not entirely implausible.
The city of Dallas has engaged in cyclical campaigns of law enforcement aimed at making Groden get out of Dealey Plaza. Groden says he has been ticketed 81 times and jailed twice in 12 years.
"Every single time, without exception, the judges have thrown it out of court," he says.
The most recent arrest and jailing, last June, resulted in a full-blown trial with legal briefs and arguments, after which a municipal judge—a city of Dallas employee—threw out the city's case against Groden, ruling he broke no law by selling his wares in Dealey Plaza. After that, Groden filed a federal civil rights suit against the city.
VIDEO: Robert Groden's Presentation at Dealey Plaza 4/23/2011
City Manager Mary Suhm declined to discuss the city's campaign against Groden, citing advice from the city attorney. She would only say generally that Dealey Plaza is still a place of pain for people of a certain age in Dallas.
"I think until my generation passes on," Suhm says, "we will always get that pain." She compares it to the effect Vietnam memorials have on those who were alive during the war, versus those born since. "I think it's a very similar thing," she says.
But then Dallas also is known for being easily embarrassed. That was clearly the case in March of last year when Erykah Badu stripped naked in Dealey Plaza for a music video. Responding to city council outrage, Dallas police, who had not witnessed the act, charged her retroactively with disorderly conduct.
It was in fact after the Badu Dealey Plaza nakedness crisis that police began cracking down on Groden, which he sees as part of a larger conspiracy to crack down on all of the vendors in Dealey Plaza, including a sun-burned handful who wander the grass selling souvenir assassination newspapers from canvas shoulder bags.
Groden says the city hopes to take him out, because he's "the most respectable" of the vendors in Dealey Plaza—an author and known expert, not just a guy with a shoulder bag.
"If they can do it to me, they can do it to anyone," Groden told Unfair Park, the Dallas Observer news blog, after his arrest a year ago. Dallas Deputy Police Chief Vince Golbeck gave credence to Groden's conspiracy theory when he told Unfair Park that the shoulder-bag vendors were cursing and spitting on tourists, which Golbeck said was "not the image we want portrayed."
But if the shoulder-bag vendors were an image problem for the police, why did they arrest Groden? At 65, a bit heavier and rounder at the shoulder than he was in his bearded '60s days, Groden looks every bit the venerable author he is. His books include High Treason, a New York Times nonfiction best seller in 1992; The Killing of a President, published in 1993 by Viking with a foreword by Oliver Stone; and The Search for Lee Harvey Oswald in 1995.
